So we agree that we can’t have all of our students prepared by having them take one multimedia course.

The alternative is to incorporate a piece of multimedia training into each of our courses. How can we do that?

Cheryl Pell at Michigan State has been teaching newspaper design for years. Now she includes an assignment for students to create an iPhone app. The students don’t do the coding part of the app but the conceptual part of the app.

The example she gave of one of the best apps was the Snow Day! app, developed by Holly Mihelic. The app would let you know if your school was closed without having to listen to the whole radio newscast about the school closings. The app lets you text your friends to set up a school’s closed get together and can reset your snooze alarm.

When I was living in Tennessee and Kentucky where we had snow days, I would have loved this app on my phone.

And this app makes the point of how we can help our students think in new technology ways and include this in courses we already have. We also don’t have to be able to execute the entire process — we can get students to do the thinking and planning.