Education Classroom Library

eZedia & the National Educational Technology Standards Project

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

• At the lowest level, students can interact with learning products that others have produced using eZedia. 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).
  
• eZedia’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 eZedia 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.”
  

• As a teaching tool, eZedia lends itself to a wide range of teaching styles. For those whose classroom situation (or personal preferences) require high levels of teacher control, eZedia 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 eZedia 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 eZedia 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.
  

• eZedia 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 eZedia “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 eZedia.) The faculty learning curve is greatly accelerated and, because of the similarities between functions in eZedia, 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 eZedia, they also see the increasing number of ways that their students can use it.