Children, as we all know, have become active and willing consumers of multimedia in the entertainment industry. On the home PC front, most machines come with the capability to produce simple multimedia. This reduction in price increases the affordability of these tools for educational purposes as well. Multimedia technology can be used to support a variety of learning settings. Any division across these settings has to be primarily for descriptive purposes.
Education is complex and multimedia is a hybrid form.
It is often the 'hybrid' adaptations that underpin the most effective learning environments. A list of basic topics, however, may be drawn up that provides a descriptive framework. This change in affordability of the tools to produce multimedia is a new one and should be a welcome one for most educational settings. As the prices continue to drop for cameras, scanners, publishing programs, video editing software and video capture devices, the use of multimedia in education has progressed from the highly complicated to a common technology. This prologue is provided here to emphasize the notions that it is not the tools that are important but what you do with them to create the different sorts of educational settings as discussed above by Poole.