In this new blog series from AEP, “What’s Keeping You Up At Night?, experts offer their advice on the most pressing issues facing the educational publishing industry. AEP members may sign up for a free half-hour consultation with the experts for 30 days after their entry is posted.
The following question was posed to our current featured expert, Pegeen Wright of Pegeen Wright Associates.
Q. How can I develop interactive content that can be used across different media platforms?
A. With proper planning you can develop interactive resources such as learning games, activities, and simulations to be deployed across multiple products and platforms. You need to begin by considering the potential uses for your new media products. For example, if you’re developing learning games for use on Interactive Whiteboards (IWBs) in a whole-class setting, you may want to be able to post these same resources (or slightly modified or enhanced versions) on your website to be used by students in a small-group or individual learning setting. Additionally, you should be able to use one set of resources on any IWB. Developing resources that are platform-neutral saves you time and money in development, manufacturing, inventory, marketing and sales.
Are you planning to develop animations or simulations that make abstract or difficult-to-teach math or science concepts more concrete? How many ways might you want to use these assets? Such resources would clearly be useful for a teacher introducing concepts to her students in a whole-class setting but may be equally valuable for individual students as part of an online tutorial or linked to an online student book (or even for teachers as part of a professional development package).
Think about multiple uses up-front and then create a plan to develop your interactive resources (or work with the right vendor to develop them) efficiently and cost effectively. This approach allows you to make the most of your instructional technology investment dollars.
Submitted by Pegeen Wright of Pegeen Wright Associates
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Pegeen Wright Associates is an educational technology consulting firm that helps K-12 publishing, media, and non-profit organizations create successful eLearning products. Pegeen Wright has over 20 years of experience in educational publishing, managing educational technology product development and marketing efforts.
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We faced this problem in 2002 when , having received a grant from our government for innovations in publishing(we were educational book publishers then)we dreamed of an interactive literacy website for primary students, with video, animations, sound and interactivity. Our technicians had to tell us that in dialup days this couldn’t be, but we started anyway with a tiny library of stories. A small number of Australian schools signed up in 2003 for internet delivery of Ziptales and 29 of them are still with us as subscribers. While “waiting for the technology to catch up” we developed CDRom versions of our materials which we sold through distributors, Scholastic Australia and a German and Malaysian company overseas. Our original website had 44 content items, now we have over 300 with the bells and whistles one could only imagine in 2002. We also have over 12% of Australian schools online with us and this is still the early adopters phase. We have now built a model for overseas distribution with individualised sites for other English speaking countries. We are a tiny family company who had a vision and believed in the power of the new technologies and can say unreservedly that it works!
I received this question from an AEP member:
“Regarding the question “How can I develop interactive content that can be used across different media platforms?,” you suggested preparing content as ‘platform-neutral.’ What exactly does that mean? Is there a way to develop content once so it works on any platform? Or [are you] just suggesting to prepare several sets of content ready-made for several platforms such as your example to develop some for the web and another set for IWB?”
Thank you for the question. To clarify, my reference to “platform neutral” referred to resources developed for use on Interactive Whiteboards (IWBs). As you know, there are many fabulous Interactive Whiteboards currently in use in U.S. schools – SMART, Promethean, Polyvision, eInstruction, and mimio – just to name a few. Most IWB manufacturers offer their own proprietary desktop software for developing IWB learning resources and would “prefer” that you deliver content or individual learning objects (a single image or animated timeline, for example) in formats that are compatible with their proprietary software. Taking this approach, however, can be inefficient, adding costs to your development, manufacturing, inventory, marketing, and sales efforts. Additionally, working within each proprietary package creates limitations on the types of interactive content you can deliver. So, developing IWB resources in a platform-neutral manner makes sense for a number of reasons.
Interactive whiteboards can display any digital content and therefore all software and digital media is IWB-compatible. Teachers and students can access and control any computer application, file, or multimedia platform via an IWB—including Adobe® Flash® software, PDFs, jpg-images, PowerPoint presentations, the Internet, CD-ROMs, and DVDs. Publishers can provide real value to educators by designing and delivering pre-assembled lessons for teachers that work on any Interactive Whiteboard. Additionally, if some of your IWB resources are developed as Flash applications, these can often be repurposed quite easily for use in online Web games or tutorials and interactive eBook extensions, etc.
For more information on this approach, see the “K-12 Publishers’ Guide to Interactive Whiteboards.” Information on this guide can be found at: http://stores.lulu.com/pegeenwright
The answer here is simple, start publishing interactive media such as a magazine, newspaper, book, report or whatever you want.
You can include some great content such as forms, video, flash and even integrate into existing webpages when using an ePublishing tool such as http://www.zmags.com.