Sonia Lara

Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to Use Technology (PT3) at Boston University through Faculty Development: Assessment of Three Years of the Project

The Boston University PT3 grant project proposed first to train faculty to use technology and then to sustain the gained expertise in a curriculum development project. Education faculty gains in integrating technology into their teaching and their modeling of that use were clearly demonstrated in phase one of the project (the initial two years of the project). In phase two (the third year), faculty were challenged to produce innovative, interdisciplinary curriculum development projects investigating judgment in their discipline. Prototypes of the Judgment Curriculum produced in phase two of the project demonstrate an intersection of technology competence and innovative, question‐driven instruction. Preliminary data show strong gains in faculty use of technology in their teaching and in faculty requirements that their students use technology in education coursework. However, continued development of the Judgment Curriculum lessons remains a challenge.

Designing Educational Multimedia

In recent years, a lot of research about the use of multimedia for instruction has been presented. Nevertheless, there is not a guide that structures the development process of educational materials. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to provide a general framework for multimedia designers which covers all the aspects from the instructional idea to the multimedia implementation. In this process we differentiate two phases: Design and Authoring. The phase of design, based on the educational objectives, developes the navigational scheme and the screens design; during the Authoring phase, that design is carried out with some authoring tool. We consider that there are four main aspects that influence both phases of the development process: technical, instructional, medium and operational. We have studied and structured them. They should be considered as fundamental criteria. The important contribution of this paper is the integrated description of the development phases and the criteria. This work is being applied towards the improvement of education of film science with multimedia technologies.