For several years our software development group at the University of South Carolina has been developing educational technology environments for interactive classrooms, including features for collaborative work and peer editing of text materials. They can log onto a student's files, conduct a dialogue about the work in a message window, and even revise or correct the student paper in the active text window while they are in contact. The program also allows for peer editing with students working with their colleagues. This program allows teachers to prepare coordinated text and sound instructional materials of their own design. Instructors can record their own digitized sounds, relate the sounds to written text, and save the results in a lesson format.
Students can then later access the lesson, containing both sound and text, on a computer network.
They can select words or phrases and play back the sounds corresponding to their selection. They can record their own voices, compare their speech to the instructor's, or answer questions in written form. The combining of text and voice in LanguageWriter broadens the whole concept of teacher-student interaction implicit in LiveWriter with flexible combinations of text and voice communication suitable in many areas of language pedagogy. In fall 1992 we began to consider new extensions to LanguageWriter using Apple's QuickTime to integrate digitized video with the text and sound capabilities of the program. In the process we realized that we might as well include digitized photography and graphics.