In our group, we looked at the apps “Flipgrid”, “Google Docs”, “Duolingo” and “Prezi”. After having a discussion on which app we wanted to research deeper, we chose Prezi. Prezi is an app that is not only accessible for teachers to use but also for students of all ages. It allows for a variety of ways to be both presented and created. It’s user friendly and allows for presentations to be 3D and interactive with the addition of pictures, words and videos. 

Although Flipgrid is a great classroom tool, we decided against it because Prezi has more interesting elements that we can focus on. Since the group evaluation of the selected multimedia app assignment makes up such a large component of our final grade, we wanted to ensure that we had enough content to cover for the evaluation. 

Another application we evaluated was Google Docs. As a whole, Google Docs is appealing because students can connect and collaborate on a platform with the ability for teachers to provide support throughout their learning. Although it’s a great application to use for students to collaborate with peers, it didn’t connect well with the multimedia principles without a set of criteria given by the teacher. For this reason, we chose Prezi because students are able to use this application more in-depth, and as a teacher, the design can connect many more principles than Google Docs.

The third Multimedia application we reviewed was Duolingo. As a whole, this application provides an engaging and interactive opportunity where information has been presented through a gamification method. However, we didn’t choose to spotlight it for our final evaluation of a Multimedia App. This platform is limiting because it’s solely for learning another language. It’s user-friendly but lacks the ability to allow users to interact with each other beyond a score. An educator can review statistics of how their students are doing but they cannot provide descriptive feedback via the application or share additional resources. A successful Multimedia App should touch upon most or all of the principles, however, Duolingo lacks prosperous cooperation of most of Multimedia Learning Principles.

Prezi touches on several Multimedia Learning principles. Some of these principles include modality, redundancy, signalling and collaboration. These principles were noted on the first app review blog post but will be explored more in our final detailed review of Prezi next week.