Designers must find ways of offering teachers control and flexibility over materials, but without under-utilising the key benefits of interactivity.
The teaching of information handling needs urgent reconsideration, and may require a specific staff development initiative if teachers are to cope adequately with the new possibilities offered by resource discs.
Given its relative success, the project can serve as a good model on which to build other educational innovations. The critical factors were the following: the discs were designed in collabora tion with teachers; they were developmentally tested in schools; they were sent out with support materials; they were disseminated to schools that had made a case for being able to use them well; practising teachers were given initial training; ongoing sup port, hardware and software support was continually available to schools; and the implementation was piloted so that lessons learned could be disseminated to all participants.
The optimal interactive medium for education is one that provides interactivity, at least some moving video, high quality stills, sound and graphics, and computer-controlled adaptivity. The optimal medium for the industry will be one that relies on low-level interactivity, avoiding adaptivity as being too expensive and difficult to pr ovide. It will be necessary to create special pressure from education if the former is to become the norm.
Interactive media should be targeted on those topics from any curriculum area that are both important and particularly difficult to teach, and where the presentation or practise of the topic requires high quality audio-visuals.
The motivational value of the medium means that it should be targeted on low ability pupils for whom it makes significant differences to their interest and attention span. For these pupils it can often make the difference between learning something and lea rning nothing.
New technology for education requires an industrial model for its development and implementation, to achieve the standards of excellence and the economies of scal e it needs to be worthwhile. These will only be achieved as the educational system moves towards large-scale long-term integrated usage of new technology. Thus the infrastructure that needs to be in place to support the optimal development and implementati on of new technology in schools touches every level and aspect of the school system.
