I think that users – our students – will require different literacy skills to make meaning from different formats and delivery modes, but I think they are an extension of traditional literacy skills.

What has changed is how students access information and how we assess it. Students are now required to listen, speak, create and articulate understanding in a range of ways. For example, my EAL students are currently working on an imaginative multi-modal text. To allow my students an opportunity to present these without the utter fear they have when presenting publicly (whilst this is still an important skill and fear to overcome!), I have set the assessment to be a recording for a short story collection for Audible. However, because it’s a multimodal task, students will need to demonstrate not only an understanding of the concepts of the play we have studied, use that as a springboard to create an imaginative piece, they will also need to engage in multimedia literacy skills to include sound effects to enhance meaning and record their spoken task as an .wmv file. They will engage in range of different literacy skills to demonstrate understanding and make meaning, including computer literacy, oral literacy, literacy with ICT, multimedia literacy and technology literacy.

So even though my students are using traditional literacy skills to deconstruct the text (reading) and write a short story (writing), they are using multiple literacies to accomplish the many facets of this task to demonstrate they have made meaning of the studied text and created a way of clearly demonstrating that.