INTRODUCTION TO MULTIMEDIA

Look and listen to the power that the computer brings in helping educators create an new and hopefully dynamic, interactive environment for learning. We are just at the beginning of this revolution in education. Many describe this as a revolution in information, but I would counter that the true revolution is for education which puts information in a relevant and meaningful context.

The power of this hypertext environment is the ability to utilize the immediacy and intimacy of television and radio, with the spoken word and music coupled to moving images, and the depth of the print media which can convey detail and continue to expand upon definition and meaning. Java applets have added a dimension to animation and along with other tools such as the animated gifs. Most authoring programs are either java-based or utilize java. Java is a computer language that is very powerful in giving instructions through the medium of the WWW. There are many websites which provide access to java applets for use.

In addition, we have the tools to organize the mix of these media and to create a random access or strictly controlled sequence of materials.

We can look at the multimedia environment conceptually as four fields of activity:

• Text: The most popular application has been to use the computer as a text tool. Word processors help us not only deal with the content of text, but also how text looks. Each of us becomes our own publisher since we can readily prepare text and have as much flexibility and capability as printers and publishers have had in the past. The first database applications were mostly for storage of information and text and numbers, but now databases can organize multimedia objects into relational databases. We can capture text by typing, speaking, or scanning if we have the right applications for these types of input.

• Images: We can paint and draw our own images with drawing and painting programs. We can also use a scanner (which works like a copy machine) to digitize color images. Our sources can be drawings, original manuscripts, music, paintings, slides, and photos, as well as "grabbed Frames" from videos. Digital cameras are making it possible to take pictures which are loaded directly into the computer, thus by-passing the scanner.

• Sound: We can digitize sound from a variety of external sources by using a microphone directly into the computer or recording a CD from the internal CD-ROM, or recording CD, DATs, and cassettes from an external input into the computer. We can also lift the sound-track off of a video. Virtually the entire world and spectrum of sound is available to us to use, and in addition we have powerful tools for editing and transforming sound.

• Moving Images: Moving images may be in the form of video as QuickTime Movies, Java Applets, and animated gifs. Images may be captured directly from digital video cameras, or with camcorders which can put imags into the computer with a video capture card. Sources for Java Applets may be found on the Internet, and there are a number of programs which enable you to make animated gifs by assembling a series of still images. These images load like a gif file and provide a moving image for the screen

Talking heads as movie clips

PowerPoint: A Multimedia Authoring Tool

A good starting place is to practice using a multimedia tool for presentations that is just as easy to use as your word processor: PowerPoint.

Microsoft's PowerPoint enables us to organize information to allow for creating multimedia materials in learning sequences that can be interesting, challenging, and colorful. There are many sites on the WWW that describe the power and use of PowerPoint. Go through the tutorial the PowerPoint in the Classroom.