These new media hold an abundance of materials including text, voice, music, graphics, photos, animation, and video. But they provide more than abundance. Bringing all these media together means that we can vastly expand the range of learning experiences, opening up the social and natural worlds. Students can explore the relations among ideas and thus experience a more connected form of learning. Perhaps most importantly, these new media are interactive, and conducive to active, engaged learning.
Students can choose what to see and do, and they have media to record and extend what they learn.
Learning is thus driven by the individual needs and interests of the learner. It is important to shift the focus from the features of hardware or software per se to the user or learner. As you know, my concern always has been for the involvement of, the training of, and the creation of the media by teachers, or at least involvement in learning landscape. For those who are beginning , here is a site with resources that are great for exploring. This is a source of information on use of PDA and some reflections from Elliot Soloway.