Multimodal Media & Digital Technology in Early Childhood: An Overview

This report provides an overview of the Australian Government's approach to promoting multimodal media and digital technology in early childhood education and school curricula, driven by the increasing prevalence of technology in young children's lives. It examines the impact of technology on children's learning and digital technology education, defining multimedia as content that utilizes text, audio, images, and animations to convey ideas. The report discusses the benefits of multimodal texts in learning, such as improved student engagement and access to online resources, while also addressing potential drawbacks like reduced reliance on traditional textbooks and face-to-face interaction. It concludes by emphasizing the importance of digital literacy for teachers and the need for effective teaching pedagogies in integrating multimodal media into education, despite the challenges and costs involved.

Running head: MULTIMODAL MEDIA AND DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY
Multimodal Media and Digital Technology in Early Childhood Education
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Table of Contents
Introduction..........................................................................................................................2
1. Approach of Australian Government in multimodal media in early childhood..............3
2. Use of Multimodal media in early childhood education and its impact..........................5
2.1. Use of multimodal media and digital technology in early childhood.......................5
3. Teaching Pedagogies for multimodal media and digital technology education..............8
Conclusion...........................................................................................................................9
References..........................................................................................................................11

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Introduction
Integration of the technology and interactive media in the early childhood programs is
generally done with an intention of building a solid developmental foundation for the students.
The use of technology in education is not new and it is quite contrast to the traditional learning
process. The use of multimedia technology in learning process is capable of improving the
understanding and skills of the young students. Moreover this process makes the learning
procedure even more interesting (Donohue & Schomburg, 2017). The use of multimedia invokes
creativity in both student and the teacher. The report gives an overview of the current Australian
Government’s approach in promoting media and digital technology in early childhood and
school curricula. This process is promoted since the contemporary young children are a part of
the generation of digital natives. Children nowadays are enveloped by technologies and the use
of technologies in their daily life and therefore it becomes very important to evaluate whether the
use of the same technology in education can make the learning process easier. The report gives
an overview of the impact of technology on the impact of the children’s learning and digital
technology education (Keengwe & Onchwari, 2009). Multimedia can be defined as the content
that makes use of different content forms including text, audio, images and animations in
displaying an idea. Use of multimedia in the classroom generally includes power point
presentations that can be created by the teacher for teaching the students. Multimedia is vital in
everyday life and therefore, it is very interesting to evaluate whether the same can be used to
make the education process easier.

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1. Approach of Australian Government in multimodal media in early childhood
With increase in use of multimedia and smart learning across the world, Australian
government has embarked on including multimodal media and digital technology in early
childhood and school curricula (Bird & Edwards, 2015). This section of the report discusses the
impact of this approach of Australian Government.
The Australian Government has quite recently made it mandatory to ICT devises in early
childhood education to gives the students a practical knowledge about the real life things. In the
current scenario of the educational institution in Australia, multimedia has overcome the barriers
of time and space to promote anywhere anytime education. Use of multimedia in early childhood
education is promoted since the multimedia facilitates the mastering of the basic skills of a
particular student by means of drill and practice (National Association for the Education of
Young Children, 2012). The use of multimedia in education helps in problems solving by
following and understanding the abstract and real life concepts. The use of multimedia and ICT
devices can help the teacher in reaching out to the students of remote locations as well in order to
facilitate the process of individualized and co operative learning. Therefore, Australian
government has made it mandatory to use multimedia in the learning process of early childhood
and in school curricula as well.
In order to identify the approach of Australian Government to the multimodal media and
digital technology in early childhood, it is essential to evaluate the concept of multimodal
education (Mills et al., 2015). Multimodal generally refers to the interconnection between the
different mode and representation of media (Hsin, Li & Tsai, 2014). Reading and writing in
multimodal encompasses the digital media, which includes print or digital text.

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Within the context of national initiative of digital education revolution by the Australian
government, it is promoted the use of multimodal education in early education. Multimodal
education is promoted since the rapid changes in the digital communication can provide the
facilities of reading and writing to be combined in more interesting manner. With this initiative
of Australian government, the digital technology is now available in most of the Australian
schools and classrooms. This initiative is particularly taken in order to make the process of
learning more creative and meaningful for the learner. The recent state government initiative of
Australia provides teachers with the opportunity of integrating various digital technological
applications in classroom practices.
This initiative is adopted by the general pass since the literacy pedagogy can no longer be
confined in the realm of only language as it needs the use of images and other electronic media
text. The teachers in every Australian school are given proper training so that they understand the
usage of multimodal in education.
NESA stage 1 gives a clear idea that in Australia, the State English syllabi makes it
mandatory for the students to learn about the role of the images in comprehension and their
composition of different kinds of texts. In the National curriculum of England and also in the
English syllabi of the Australian states, the grammar is required to be taught. Australian states
incorporate functional grammatical concepts and combine it with multimodal in giving the
students a clear idea of the subject.
Therefore, it can be said that the Australian government have taken strategic initiatives in
implementing and integrating multimodal education in early childhood. This initiative has been
taken in order to improve the process of improving the process of education. The following

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section discusses impact of multimodal media and digital technology on children’s learning and
development. Although it is an innovative idea to include multimodal media in education, it is
very essential to evaluate its negative impacts on the education of a child.
2. Use of Multimodal media in early childhood education and its impact
This section of the report discusses the use of multimodal media and digital technology in
education. Along with the usage of multimedia in education, this section of the report will further
discuss about the positive and the negative impacts of multimodal education in early childhood.
2.1. Use of multimodal media and digital technology in early childhood
It is very important to evaluate the benefits of technology and multimodal media in early
childhood education. Use of multimodal texts in learning process can be very beneficial for both
the students and the teachers and can be used as a learning aid (Allvin, 2014). With the advent of
multimodal media, the texts are no longer restricted to print technology so that the students get
an opportunity to use a range of multimodal texts. Use of multimodal text and ICT helps in
improving the students’ engagement in class as it helps in increasing their interest about a
particular topic. The use of rich pictures, ipads and smart learning helps the students in gaining a
practical knowledge about the subject (Simon & Donohue, 2011). This is an initiative taken by
the Australian government and the different places across the globe since it helps in improving
the students’ engagement with the curricula (Merchant, 2015).
Coupled with the multimodal media, the use of internet helps in accessing the online
educational resources from anyplace. Use of digital technology has revolutionized the way of
imparting education. Mobile devices are increasingly used by the people for exchanging ideas. It
provides the opportunities to communicate with the other people irrespective of their location.

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Therefore, mobile learning is an excellent use of multimodal education and teachers make use of
mobile devices and smart learning in order to impart knowledge to the students in an interesting
way.
Therefore it can be said that the multimodal approach imparts a creative learning and
teaching process in education. Multimodal approach is a source of creativity for both teachers
and the students as it draws on the available vision, audio and kinesthetic modes of technology
(Vanderloo, 2014). The multimodal approach enhances the classroom experience of the students
of early education by improving the interaction of the teachers with the students and vice versa.
It can therefore be said that technology has a positive impact on education and the
different countries across the globe should take the advantage of using technology for the
educational purpose. In this emerging world the children spend several hours each day in use of
the digital devices. However, the overuse of the technology can result in the negative result as
well. Therefore, the positive impact of the multimodal media and digital currency in early
childhood and school curricula are as follows-
1. One the major advantages of using multimodal media and technology in education
purpose is that the teachers may not have to remain dependent on the library of school.
Furthermore, it helps in globalization as a particular school can remain connected with the
different schools across the globe.
2. Self authored e books that are used in different schools are vehicle for helping the early
childhood professionals in engaging the young children in literacy and language experiences
(Shuker & Terreni, 2013). The provision of the language and the literacy experiences is therefore
essential in early childhood learning environments. Information and communication technology

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is therefore, and essential tool for early childhood professionals to make the process of learning
even more interesting. The self authored e books can be designed making use of Microsoft office
suite.
3. With evolvement of the technology, there has been a considerable acceptance of the
digitals forms of literacy. This has helped designing the course for children in a more interesting
way, like in case of Australia. The use of digital devices is expected to keep the students
engaged with the learning process.
These are the major benefits of incorporating multimodal media and digital technology in
early childhood (Serafini, 2012). The use of multimodal media and digital technology in
education is although a costly alternative to the traditional teaching process, it can definitely help
in improving the teaching process and can further help in engaging the students in constructive
learning process. However, there is some negative impact of the use of multimodal media and
digital technology pedagogy in early childhood which is as follows (Ebbeck et al., 2016)-
1. The use of multimodal media effectively reduces the need of books. This is a negative
impact of technology in education since the children does not develop the habit of the reading
text books which are good sources of knowledge.
2. Use of technology is education often bypasses the need of face to face interaction with
the teacher which is another negative impact of digital learning (Lim, 2015).
3. Since se of multimodal media and digital technology in education needs the usage of
mobile devices in classroom, it can definitely be a source of distraction as well (Nemeth &
Erdosi, 2012). This is therefore a negative impact of the multimodal media in education.

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Therefore it can be said that use of multimodal media and digital technology pedagogy in
early childhood and school curricula although improves the efficiency of teaching and learning
process, there are certain disadvantages as well (Nemeth & Simon, 2013). However, the adoption
of multimodal media in education is expected to increase since it is an effective way for
imparting a practical knowledge to the students. However, it becomes important to evaluate the
teaching pedagogies for the multimodal media and digital technology education.
3. Teaching Pedagogies for multimodal media and digital technology education
In last few years, the teaching process has changed drastically. With the emergence of
information and communication technologies, the method of teaching has changes over the
years. The teaching processes using multimodal media requires the teachers to have a high level
digital literacy along with the knowledge about the use of different range of technologies within
the digital pedagogies (Grushka & Donnelly, 2010). The teachers need to have a sound
knowledge about the operation of different ICT devices in order to make use of the multimodal
media in the process of education.
Since literacy entails a wider range of interconnecting elements that includes the
decoding of the text in multimodal scripts, visual interpretation and media manipulation, the
teachers need to adopt new tools and skills to teach literacy in the same way (Leu & Forzani,
2012).
The process of digital pedagogy includes different axiomatic changes in a constructivist
approach. The digital pedagogy therefore includes the planning process for learning which are
majorly based on problem solving. It is therefore necessary for the teachers to develop pedagogy
that will embed the digital communication technologies and texts in meeting the curriculum

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outcomes and assessment requirements associated with a particular course. It is very essential to
have an idea how the children will interpret a multimodal text or images that are used in the
learning process. The teaching process is needed to be designed in such a way that emphasis is
laid on high level cognitive skills that the teachers will be requiring in making the students
understand the right interpretation of a particular image. In other words, it is necessary for the
teachers to understand what specifically is happening and what can happen or the impact of a
particular multimodal image on a student.
Therefore it can be said that the teaching process for multimodal media and digital
technology education is a bit different from the traditional teaching process, where not only the
students but the teachers are needed to develop skill for understanding the new ways of
imparting education to the student (Kalas, 2010). This new educational process is majorly
practical based where the students are given not only a theoretical understanding of a particular
topic but also are given a practical knowledge. This particularly has a great impact in early
education as this is the time when the students get to learn about the different things (Styles &
Arzipe, 2001). The multimodal media education helps in giving the students a practical idea of
those things which would otherwise not be possible.
Several Australian schools therefore made it mandatory to use the digital process of
imparting education so that the students have a clear knowledge of different things in their early
age. Therefore, it becomes very essential for the teachers to have a clear knowledge about the use
of the different digital devices that are used in education.
Conclusion

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The use of technology has increased over the years. The technology finds its application
in the educational sector as well. The use of multimodal media and technology in education has
revolutionized the way of imparting education across the world. The report gives an overview of
the process of using multimodal media and technology in early education. The report evaluates
the case of Australia where the Australian government has ensured that the schools make use of
digital technology in early education. Technology can be used in improvising the process of
education by giving the students an opportunity to gain a practical knowledge, side by side with
the theoretical knowledge. The report discusses the positive and the negative impact of digital
education. In order to incorporate multimodal media and digital technology in the process of
education, the teachers need to have a proper idea about the operation of the digital devices so
that they are able to make an optimum use of them in the classrooms. The report discusses the
teaching pedagogies for multimodal media and digital technology in education. There are both
positive and negative impacts of the process; however, the use of multimodal media in school
curricula is expected to increase in future as well since it offers a number of benefits. The
benefits or the positive impact of multimodal education on students’ learning process is
discussed in this report as well.

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References
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