d)+Resource+3

Bankstown City Council. (2009). Community Atlas:About the city. http://atlas.id.com.au/About.aspx?id=101&pg=2100

=__Multimodal Text: Community Atlas - About the city__ =



= __ Explanation of Resource __ = = = This resource is an interactive webpage about the Bankstown community and its surrounding suburbs. The webpage or ‘community atlas’ is a multimodal text as it uses an array of visual and written texts including maps, text, tables, captions, graphs and charts to describe the various facets of the Bankstown community including its history and culture. The resource enables students to interact with current ICT technology and features content from both the English and HSIE syllabus contributing to an integrated study. = __ Relevance of Outcome __ = = = In terms of the desired HSIE outcome, CUS2.3, the interactive webpage is a resource of immense use and is of particular relevance to the intended cultural study of the Bankstown community. The webpage through the interactive map, text and charts encompassing the history, demographics and population statistics provides information on various content featured in the HSIE syllabus. This content includes languages spoken in the community, origins and backgrounds of people in the community and its original inhabitants and the diversity of groups within the community. = __ Aspect of Literacy to be Explored __ = = = This resource is of particular use in educating students in a literacy context because of the way it uses many forms of literacy to convey information in the forms of textual modes. The interactive webpage enables students to explore various literacy aspects including text composition and their intended audiences, text structure, interactive quality of images, realism in terms of the extent to which images featured on the site (mainly maps) depict aspects of the material world which it represents”. (Unsworth, 2001, p. 98) In addition a further area of exploration would be in establishing and determining the relationship between visual and verbal grammar (Unsworth, 2001, p. 70) presented in texts and the implications this has on text audiences. While visually and textually the information covers similar content including the community parameters and cultural groundings, the way these texts are represented in conjunction with one another allow different interpretations to be drawn because of their different modal representations. Multi-modal representation or multimodality is an area of significance as it allows students to investigate how different modes of communication cause meaning to be conveyed in different ways and how this contributes to understanding. The multimodality represented in the website will give students a greater ability to not only make interpretations “between the possibilities of connections across elements” (Kress, 2003, p. 59) but also to distinguish the information of greater relevance pervaded by which feature is most dominant and how layout contributes to similar interpretations. Knowledge of the individual features of multimodal texts in conjunction with the study on Bankstown will better prepare students in constructing a formulated multimodal task that integrates English and HSIE content. In addition engagment and interaction with this resource will contribute to students' abilities to draw meaning from a wider range of texts and content areas and make informed decisions and judgments about their implications on topics and issues to be studied. __

Resources: __ Kress, G. (2003). //Lieracy in the New Media Age.// Routledge: London. (Chapter 4: Literacy and Multimodality).

Unsworth, L. (2001). //Multiliteracies across the curriculum: changing contexts of text and image in classroom practice.//Buckingham, England: Open University. Chapter 3 - Describing visual literacies.