Canva is a free website for designing professional quality images and graphics. Canva offers pre-made templates that you can customize, such as posters, social media graphics, infographics, and flyers. When you get to the website it will ask you to sign up with your email. Once you sign in, it will ask you invite friends to see your work but you can skip over that part and get started with the process of creating custom images and graphics. Click on any template, then double-click on any text/image to edit. When you are done creating your masterpiece, you can download it as a jpg, png, or pdf.

If you include background music, make sure it’s not too loud, otherwise, it’ll distract the viewer.

Screencastify is a screen recording extension for Google Chrome. It is a light-weight, powerful, and easy-to-use screen recorder. However, it has a time limit of 10 minutes per recording with the free account. To get started, you must download and install the Screencastify extension on your Chrome Browser. Click on the Screencastify icon in the top right corner of your web browser and sign in with your Google account.

Adobe Spark is a free online tool that lets you create beautiful videos, images, and web pages. This video-making software allows you to create compelling video stories quickly by piecing together slides of visuals with audio. Here is how you use it:

Using Audacity, you can export your recording in various formats, including mp3, WAV, and OGG. Here is how you Export your file.

Similar to Vocaroo, this is an online voice recording tool that is convenient and simple to use.

Chunk it

Concrete - Don't use abstract terms or complex jargon. Present information in a way that is relevant to the audience.

Use media in an ethical and legal manner - If you upload a video to YouTube with a popular song as the background music, it will be flagged and taken down. Use your own original art or Creative Commons works with attribution (explore Chapter 3 for more information about finding and using Creative Commons media).

designing digital media that positively impacts learning (aka whether visitors acquire information from your site) is quite challenging.

First and foremost, design with your audience in mind

Consider the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework, which was designed to “improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn”

In a world where media consumption is deeply embedded into nearly everyone’s life, it is essential that your website offer the same type of multimodal learning experience.