A Transmedia Project
Transmedia: a narrative that extends beyond multiple media forms; may or may not be interactive.
In ECI 201, we were given the assignment of creating a transmedia project within groups based off a book our group choose. My group choose the book “Fancy Nancy”!
Picture Citation: https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060542092/fancy-nancy/
This assignment requires each of its member to create a component of transmedia that links back to the book. We then assembled all the components together within one website. The website URL is listed below!
Fancy Nancy Website URL: https://754715531053761916.webstarts.com/quiz.html
This is a picture of the homepage of the website. The section where it says “Home” all the way though “Write Your own Letter” are all tabs that lead to different resources of transmedia. For example, my portion of the project was making flashcards that associate a French word with the English version of it. So, if you want to access the flashcards, you click on the “Flashcards” tab and then once you click on it, you will see this:
This is a picture of the homepage of the website.
For example, my poriton of the project was making flaschards where one side says an English word and the other side says the French term for that word. So, if you want to access the flashcards, you click on the “Flashcards” tab and then once you click on it, you will see this:
By adding bright colors and pictures it allows for its users to stay engaged.
I choose to do flashcards because the character, Fancy Nancy, loves saying French words. This allows the users to learn a some terms in French, while still relating to the book.
What I Gained From This Experience
Being given the opportunity to do this transmedia project allowed me to gain perspective from a producer of transmedia. Usually, I am the one who is using the transmedia and not creating it. By collaborating with my group, we came up with creative ideas on what specific transmedia we should produce. I also learned how to produce transmedia through multiple resources.
Why Students Should Be Able to Produce Transmedia
There are many reasons students should gain the educational experience of producing transmedia, here are some of them:
- It allows them to interact with technology in ways that they haven’t before.
- It engages critical thinking as well as creative thinking.
–Creative Thinking comes into play when they produce their own unique transmedia and being creative with how they produce it.
–Critical Thinking is involved when you are deciding on content to produce in your transmedia (What content should be put in it? How do we challenge the users? What is the overall goal the users are taking on?).
- It allows them to engage in a different kind of learning environment.
- They are doing a concept called “learning-by-doing”. As they are producing the transmedia themselves they are learning how to do the process of creating transmedia.
- It advances their digital skills.
- Transmedia involves working with multiple digital resources so the students will get experience with a diverse amount of resources.
My Future Classroom-Making their own Transmedia
Although, I do feel it’s important to have students become users of transmedia, I also feel it’s important that they experience becoming producers of transmedia. That’s why I will dedicate time in my lesson plan to teach my students how to create certain elements of transmedia and will have them produce a component of their choice (quiz, video, etc.). With my technology resources, I will show them how to work with certain resources to create the transmedia content.
By them gaining experience with this in the classroom, they will have pre-existing knowledge on how to approach making transmedia. By learning this skill now, it could help them with their future careers. The kids will present the transmedia they produced to the class and explain how it relates back to the story they originally choose as their subject.
An article titled, “With Pictures, Puzzles and Games, Students Create Transmedia Stories”:
This article provides an example of a student, Alice, who produced transmedia and explains how she did it and what she produced.
This shows that students have the capability of producing transmedia!