As a result of the rapidly evolving nature of the economy from an industrial era to one based on digital technologies, schools face particular challenges in preparing students to function effectively in an environment of constant change. The challenges cross discipline areas and grade levels and cause all partners in the education enterprise to re-examine the concept of effective preparation in fundamental learning skills. As a result, ISTE has joined with other partners to establish a set of core skills and understandings.  “The primary goal of the ISTE NET Standards project is to enable stake holders in PreK-12 education to develop national standards for educational uses of technology that facilitate school improvement in the US” ( p.xi, ISTE National Educational Technology Standards for Students, 2000).

    The NETS project sets out standards* and performance indicators for PreK-12 students that focus on six core areas:1. Basic operations and concepts
2. Social, ethical, and human issues
3. Technology productivity tools
4. Technology communication tools
5. Technology research tools
6. Technology problem-solving and decision-making tools
*pages 4 & 5 of the ISTE National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers, 2000

The core standards are the same for students at all grade levels. However, performance indicators appropriate to specific grade levels help to identify the kinds of knowledge and skills that students are expected to have. What the performance indicators make clear is that the aim is not simply to have students become proficient users of hardware and software, but rather to help them use technology to further their understanding of the content they are studying, to enhance their ability to communicate what they know and how they think, and to support their ability to think critically, make and evaluate decisions, and to solve problems. That is, the goal is not technology proficiency per se, but rather, the development of independent learners.

    There is a corresponding set of standards** for all educators that also specifically address the skills and understandings critical for pre-professionals in teacher preparation programs at the post-secondary level:
1. Technology operations and concepts
2. Planning and designing learning environments and experiences
3. Teaching, learning, and the curriculum
4. Assessment and evaluation
5. Productivity and professional practice
6. Social, ethical, legal, and human issues
**page 9 of the ISTE National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers, 2000
    As with the students, performance indicators serve to specify the kinds of knowledge and skills expected of teachers at a variety of levels, from those involved in pre-service preparation through student-teaching and the initial teaching year to experienced classroom teachers. These performance indicators make it clear that the aim is not simply to become proficient in using specific programs. Rather, technology-proficient teachers should be able to knowledgeably and selectively use appropriate technological tools in ways that support, extend, and enhance the learning process.

How does eZediaMX support the development of these NETS proficiencies for both students and teachers?

• eZediaMX is a multimedia/hypermedia authoring environment that can grow with the user.
• The fact that eZediaMX is both flexible and easy to use enables students and teachers with a wide range of proficiency and comfort levels to meet the NETS.
• eZediaMX’s inherent power allows users to expand their creative options as their skills increase.
• The versatility of eZediaMX allows students and educators to do more with less and to do more in less time.
• eZediaMX accommodates multiple teaching styles and is complementary with a number of discipline areas.
• Producing a project with eZediaMX can address multiple NET Standards and performance indicators.

eZediaMX’s flexibility
For students:

• At the lowest level, students can interact with learning products that others have produced using eZediaMX. These kinds of experiences provide familiarity with basic concepts and skills needed to use computer applications (such as starting a program, using a mouse and following screen directions).
• eZediaMX’s drag and drop capabilities allow even beginning students to create simple projects and presentations with sophisticated elements (such as “rollovers,” in which a picture or text element “appears” as the mouse passes over a designated spot or region on the screen). Similarly, clicking and dragging allows students to make a graphic follow a specified path across the screen (path animation). In this way, they can demonstrate their understanding of science processes (like evaporation and condensation) or the movement of troops in a social studies lesson. A static map of a Civil War battlefield can be transformed into a dynamic way to tell the story of how events unfolded, as the path indicating troop movements can be linked to a sequence of narrations, movie clips and associated web links. Levels of interaction in projects can be scaled up or down. Students can create hot spots where users can click buttons to begin movies, narrations, etc. or they can create branching projects that take advantage of user input to provide multiple paths through the project.
• While the underlying processes of project creation are simple, in combination, they provide a powerful means by which students can construct, refine and communicate their understanding of what occurred and why. At all levels, the process of project design and development lends itself to collaborative interactions, one means specified in the NETS guidelines for fostering positive attitudes toward uses of technology in social contexts. In fact, designing an eZediaMX project provides a context for developing a wide range of the skills and understandings specified in the standards and performance indicators. For example, deciding what elements to include provides opportunities to develop information literacy skills associated with determining the accuracy and authority of a piece of information, and to make ethical decisions with respect to copyright in crediting those sources appropriately. In working with students through a structured planning process, students have opportunities to segment a complex task into manageable components, to make decisions regarding how to sequence elements in presenting their viewpoint, and to solve problems when the results do not correspond to what they had intended.
• At the other end of the spectrum, students can take increasing advantage of the design components and the advanced logic, branching and linking capabilities (to the Net and to other applications) that eZedia provides, to produce sophisticated and highly interactive products that reflect what they have learned. Thus, as the student grows and develops, each can build upon what they already know. The core skills in using eZedia remain the same, so that the more students use it, the easier it is for them to see opportunities to apply what they know. As the program’s more advanced capabilities can be accessed using the click and drag and menu selections with which students are already familiar, the “learning curve” is both rapid and gentle. Consequently, students can spend less of their time and energy in learning the program and can devote more of their resources to using its features to develop a coherent and compelling representation of the content they are learning. That is, eZedia provides a means by which students can “make their thinking visible.”

For teachers:

• As a teaching tool, eZediaMX lends itself to a wide range of teaching styles. For those whose classroom situation (or personal preferences) require high levels of teacher control, eZediaMX enables teachers to develop activity templates in which the choices to be made by students can be clearly structured. As positioning can be accomplished simply by clicking and dragging, and other relevant characteristics of each element in an eZediaMX frame can be specified, activities can be structured in ways that have students focus more attention on the content of their message than on cosmetic attributes such as the color and size of fonts.
• Teachers seeking to use more open-ended tasks to facilitate students’ thinking and learning will also find eZediaMX to be congenial. The simple yet powerful logic tools also provide a rich environment to challenge students to develop and use higher order thinking skills in realistic problem-solving situations. By providing students with ready access to powerful tools, such as the ability to annotate movies, teachers can assess what students know in ways that tests and other conventional measures cannot provide. Thus, for example, to determine what a student understands about a topic such as acceleration, he/she could be asked to mark where critical points in the process are reflected in a brief clip of a basketball traveling through the air and to describe what is happening at each of those points.

For faculty:

• eZediaMX is showing itself to be a program with a wide-range of appeal across discipline areas even at the post-secondary level. Faculty seeking to develop simple interactive projects where students can gain immediate feedback on their understanding find the speed with which they can develop these tools makes eZediaMX “faculty friendly.”
• The ease with which more sophisticated features can be incorporated into presentations also enhances the program’s appeal for users who are not as “tech savvy” as others. (As one faculty member said, what took him three days in Authorware, took him three minutes in eZediaMX.) The faculty learning curve is greatly accelerated and, because of the similarities between functions in eZediaMX, the “forgetting curve” is also greatly reduced. The result is faculty don’t spend days learning a program feature that is so complex that the next time they go to use it, they have to start pretty much at the beginning again to puzzle it out. More importantly, as faculty across disciplines use eZediaMX, they also see the increasing number of ways that their students can use it.

The challenge posed by eZediaMX:
    eZediaMX represents a new category of tool that previously was not readily accessible for the average user. The cost, complexity, and steep learning curve of high-end authoring environments, such as Director and Authorware, made them unfeasible to promote widespread use in almost any situation. However, commonly available low-end tools, such as PowerPoint, don’t provide the power and flexibility for students to produce projects that clearly demonstrate more sophisticated ways of extending their learning.
    eZediaMX’s high-degree of design flexibility at all age levels is primarily limited by both the imagination and thinking skills of the end user. It is a tool that can grow with the user. Just as the NET Standards performance indicators demonstrate increasing sophistication through the grade levels, eZediaMX does the same, simply through the inherent structure of the program. Shaking off old mental models of the design limitations due especially to the complexity of most multimedia authoring packages is going to be the single, greatest challenge posed by eZediaMX for end-users. What was previously not possible is now readily available.
 
Contact information: janemadden@bellsouth.net
June, 2001
As a PT3 partner, eZedia, Inc. is granted permission to photocopy the draft or to use extracts from the draft.
ISTE has made the National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers (that also indicates the standards for students) available online as a PDF. The address for that file is: http://www.iste.org/standards/index.html