CHAPTER 10
Producing electronic material
What are electronic materials?
Electronic materials refer to informational resources, exercises and activities that teachers create and the learners use on a computer as web page or CD-ROM content, or even in printed form. There are many reasons why teachers might want to create and use their own electronic materials in class. Firstly, teachers will be able to provide extra practice for weaker learners, and consolidation and review exercises for groups. Secondly, as teachers build up a collection of their own resources with their own learners’ need in mind, teachers will start to generate a large bank of materials which can be used in class or for self-study at any point in the future. In class these kinds of materials can provide a change of pace and can be highly motivating.
Creating electronic materials online
One of the easist way of getting started in creating electronic materials online is to use some of the simple exercise generators which can be found online. One of the most popular is the Discovery School Puzzlemaker (http://puzzlemaker.school.discovery.com). Puzzle makers are ideal tools for reviewing vocabulary, and take the hard work out of preparing many different quick qiizzes. Another useful tool is Smile (http://smile.clear.msu.edu.). This tool allows teachers to create a free account in which to manage their own online bank of exercises with student tracking and a good variety of exercise types.
What is an outhoring tool?
An authoring tool is an installable program that allows teachers to create materials in electronic format which can then be distributed on a CD-ROM, DVD, USB pen drive, floppy disc or via a web page to the learners. Authorinng programs are used to make CD-ROM-based reference tools like Microsoft Encarta, but also more simple resources like information leaflets, brochures, handouts and interactive exercises.
Using authoring tools to produce materials
One of the most famous authoring tool in teachers field is Hot Potatoes. This is a small Windows or Mac program that creates a variety of exercises and can be freely downloaded for educational porposes (http://hotpot.uvic.ca/). This program will install on teachers computerand allow teachers to create web-based execises of the following types:
- multiple choice
- short answer
- jumbled sentence
- crossword
- matching/ordering
- gap-fill
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