The Aurora Study Guide shown during the presentation is available here as a download. It is an 8 mb. zipped file. Double-click on the index file to start the project in your browser. 

Introduction
The concept of the multimedia glossaries grew out of an earlier idea - e-Writing. The focus of e-Writing was to have students organize their ideas, plan their work using something like Inspiration and then execute their ideas in a multimedia environment. For those who have heard us, you know that we have a constant and on-going interest in developing and reinforcing student language skills, especially when it comes to content area language. Students learn in different ways. e-Writing opens up some additional doors using common tools to assist students most at risk. You can find the article here as a zipped file.

As with all things, the issues associated with implementing them in the classroom can be problematic. Along with the article on e-Writing, we've included an appendix that provides educators with common forms that can smooth the way. We've made those available online, as well.

The multimedia glossaries build on e-Writing and the use of multimedia to reinforce ideas for students. Again, as we said during the session, the idea is to have students create these glossaries - not the teacher. The multimedia glossaries identify core ideas, concepts, or vocabulary, develops brief written explanations, augments those with multimedia elements, and then might add in an assessment component built using Hot Potatoes. The process of developing the guides further cements the concepts for the students in a way that is designed to keep their attention on the critical issues.

During our presentation, you saw us using Hot Potatoes to have students create the assessment component for their multimedia glossaries. Hot Potatoes is free to educators who are willing to share their resources with other teachers. Here's where you'll find more information on Hot Potatoes, as well as movies showing you how to do Hot Potatoes.
Hot Potatoes Resources at our site:
http://www.jmadden.info/Hot_Potatoes.htm


What is a multimedia glossary?

Why would we use them?

What they aren't

What tools can we use to build them?
Think of the tools in 2 sets:

Preparation . . .

Production . . .

The Major Components of the Multimedia Glossary
1. Content presented in a multimedia format
2. Questions to see if people actually remember the content!


Overview of the Steps in the Process
Step 1:     Decide upon your topic.
Step 2:     Work out an overview plan of your project.
Step 3:     Using Inspiration, develop a detailed plan of the content and questions.
Step 4:     Storyboard the project.
Step 5:     Develop all the text pieces in a word processor.
Step 6:     Gather all the multimedia pieces and put in folders
Step 7:     Create Hot Potatoes questions

Critical Issues Discussed During the Session
The basis for developing the multimedia glossaries is to re-engage students with the material they have been studying. While the guides could contain anything, the idea is not to make them long and exhausting. It is simply to highlight the more difficult ideas. Combining multimedia elements to illustrate the concepts taps into multiple modes of learning. Students are imposing their organization on the process - not simply reproducing something that the teacher has provided. Developing the questions using Hot Potatoes also serves to reverse engineer the process for the students, so to speak. Here they have to consider how to phrase questions, how to pick out possible alternative examples, etc. For many students, the questions teachers ask are a complete mystery. They don't understand how educators come up with the questions. In this part of the process, students get involved with seeing how things come together.

Do you have to do it all?
No.  Members of other audiences have talked to us about limitations at their sites. In cases where teachers have computers but few software resources, we suggested they start with Hot Potatoes Suite.

Is there another way to create these?
Most definitely. If the only resources you had were Inspiration and Hot Potatoes Suite, you could use the hyperlink capabilities in Inspiration to link to the Hot Potatoes Suite questions. Speaking of Inspiration, here is the diagram we created in Inspiration as an example of how one might organize a project like the auroras glossary/study guide at the top of this page.




Couldn't I use PowerPoint?
Yes, using PowerPoint is not an issue for the most part. There are a huge number of multimedia resources that students can access that are in QuickTime format. PowerPoint does not play nicely with QuickTime. You have to play QuickTime movies outside of the PowerPoint environment. Other software packages can handle far more file formats with ease. Another issue is that PowerPoint can produce very large files. We tried this out using identical resources to make the same project and compared PowerPoint and eZediaQTI. The difference was staggering, especially if you extrapolated the number of projects created to more realistically represent the student population over an entire school.

Where can I find some of these multimedia resources?
We have a page at our site that lists a variety of resources. The federal government in the US has produced a massive pile of multimedia materials that students can easily use in projects. Think of your topic in terms of which federal agency might be handling it. Check their website and you'll probably find resources beyond what you had imagined.