Dr. Baggio explains each design principle with exquisite precision and demonstrates each with practical applications. It is truly a book that I will use for many years. Unfortunately, reading this book has made me so disappointed by presentations that have not adhered to the good design or instructional principles.
This last week I attended the WestED English Learners with Disabilities Virtual Summit 2020. There were alot of resources that were used towards this summit. The school district paid WestED and paid the teachers and admin that attended. The audience was intended for the Special Ed and ELL teachers but also was intended for general education teachers. So administration and intervention teachers were also in attendance. From the very beginning of the summit I was struck by this quote from Dr. Baggio's book "Combining visuals with auditory words to convey a message is what Ruth Clark terms redundancy." The powerpoint presentations were text heavy and the presenter typically read the text verbatim. When someone in the chat asked a question they were referred to the resources in a padlet wall. Many of which were guides taken from websites that were more than 100 pages long. I signed up for this summit to get ideas to help me support the Students with disabilities and my English Language Learners. I do not have the time or energy to become a special ed teacher. Dr. Baggio says "One of the worst effects is to put type on the screen and then deliver it into audio also. .... The learner is trying to read the screen, convert the words for the auditory channel and listen at the same time...the cognitive load probably went right through the roof!" I would agree. Then the presenters wanted the attendees to download documents and have attendees complete those documents. I knew doing this during a zoom presentation would overwhelm my laptop as well. This is when I began looking critically at the Instruction Design of this webinar. I was not impressed. Yet, all the reviews in the chat were overwhelmingly positive. I feel like I am the only person that saw the emperor with no clothes.
I guess it was good for me to see an example of what not to do. Now it is my turn to apply the principles of CRAP and the S.I.T.E. model, through the lens of TPACK to create lessons that will bring my students to Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development to maximize their learning. Or as George Couros and Katie Novak expound "to empower learners through Universal Design for Learning and the Innovator's Mindset." These encapsulate my goals when creating lessons for students or designing meetings for collaborating with my professional learning community.