A few thoughts about using multimedia and interactivity to stimulate learning.

What makes multimedia so exciting for the learner is that it engages multiple sensory modes. This can only help in a time that kids and young adults are accustom to action movies that use computer technology to place the actors in unimaginable places and situations. Not to mention the extremely fast paced gaming world that our students are using every day.

Multimedia courseware offers students flexible access to content. It allows them to be freed from a linear learning sequence. It offers a solution for the multiple learning styles and supports self-paced learning.

It frees students from being confined to a classroom and permits the rich content to be used any time, anywhere that a student has access to a computer.

For the teacher it offers flexibility in how their lesson is presented. It offers ways to help keep students interested in presentations through colorful graphics, animation, video, and sound. Today teachers go way beyond a written description with a few photos in a book. Multimedia programs and websites enable us to create a more stimulating environment that will hold the students attention longer.

On a personal note:

After presenting a lesson on digital art I realized that my students had very little knowledge about color theory. Even the basics of how primary colors when mixed together create secondary colors.
I used this opportunity to create an interactive, multimedia presentation to teach color theory. I started with the basic concepts of primary, secondary, tertiary and included a few color schemes. I incorporated, interactivity, animation and sound to create a stimulating environment to teach the concept of color.

Using a Flash file to replace a graphic can add excitement to a webpage. As you can experience below, it is much more stimulating to interact with the color wheel that just viewing a graphic.