To promote students’ awareness about diversity and to create and sustain an ethic of inclusion, it is vital to offer them critical analytical skills necessary to understand systems of power and the tools to create change. Although many faculty already integrate diverse perspectives, materials, and pedagogical approaches into their courses, many of us struggle to diversify our course content and teaching strategies. In this presentation, I overview the process of incorporating diversity into a literacy education course at a Midwestern university in the United States. In particular, I discuss how the use of modern educational technology enhanced students’ learning experience of diversity. In so doing, I focus on Plotagon, a video production app. Plotagon software provides a user-friendly script editor to narrate a story through custom-made characters, actions, emotions, scenes, dialogues, music, sound effects, and plots. Students were 100 male and female undergraduate preservice teachers enrolled in a required literacy education course. Each student read a multicultural young adult novel of their choice and created an animated video version of a few scenes of the book in Plotagon. Integrating Plotagon multimedia medium into this instructional practice brought specific attention to the concept of diversity. The animated scenes enhanced the delivery of content and demonstrated students’ mastery of multicultural books. Also, the animated video clips provided excellent peer-assessment opportunities and promoted thought-provoking discussions about different aspects of diversity among preservice teachers. Furthermore, through the creation of animated video clips, students were able to foster the fundamental skills of analysis, creativity, and engagement into their learning process. With no question, integrating Plotagon educational technology into traditional teaching of literacy education course is only one example of how technology may assist diversifying our course content and teaching strategies.
With this presentation, I look forward to encountering more educational apps that will serve as a foundation for promoting diversity and providing our students with a vision to thrive in the future.