This is where students and teachers can come up with ideas and create their own materials that look the way they want them to. HyperStudio and Leonardo's Multimedia Toolbox are examples of interactive programs. You can use a scanner or a digital camera, but you can also simply draw pictures and animate them. Getting additional equipment, such as digital cameras and scanners, is a result of wanting the end-product to be more sophisticated. Ideally, a classroom of 30 children needs at least four computers, authoring software, a printer and possibly a scanner and digital camera.
Multimedia encourages language, reading and writing development for all ages.
The real value in multimedia is as a process. Young children live to see their work animated, whether it's with their own drawings, drawings taken from the Internet or software, or with pictures taken with a digital camera. Multimedia gets them more interested in writing and creating. As children get older, the project created with the same application is going to be more sophisticated. For both the traditional and multimedia report, students will do library and Internet-based research.