Previous chapters em phasized the use of mul timedia projects that are cre - ated by the educator. As you have read this book and worked through the ex am- ples, I hope you have got ten several ideas for projects that you want to create for your stu dents. A more powerful use of multimedia is to have stu dents create their own pro jects. Many stud ies have shown the pos itive educational im pact of students
designing their own multimedia pro jects. See, for ex ample, Liu and Hsiao (2001), Liu and Rutledge (1997), or Lehrer, Erickson, and Connell (1994). While this can be a powerful ed ucational op portunity, it also can be im practical for a number of reasons, not the least of which are that it is very time-consuming and that your stu- dents might lack the technical skills to be suc cessful.
Have no fear. Your stu dents can still get many of the benefits of what you have learned in this book without hav ing to learn it all (or any of it) themselves. That is where templates come in. If you de sign a pro ject from scratch, you have to de cide on the ap pro pri ate me dia, ap pro pri ate kinds of in for ma tion, and ap pro - priate or ganization for your pro ject. In addition, you have to develop the pro ject (including pre paring the media, the PowerPoint slides, the VBA, etc.). A tem- plate al lows you to create some of these things for your students. Templates have been used to fa cil i tate mul ti me dia cre ation by pro fes sional de sign ers; see, for example, O’Connor (1991). Agnew, Kellerman, and Meyer discusses the use of templates with stu dents: “The pri mary pur pose of giv ing stu dents a template for their early pro jects is to al low them to con centrate most of their attention on achieving academic objectives” (1996, p. 250).
Something as simple as a PowerPoint pro ject about an an imal can use a template. You could tell your stu dents that the presentation should con tain four slides: a ti tle slide, a slide about the an imal’s hab itat with a pic ture of the an imal, a slide about what the animal eats, and a slide for cit ing re sources. Those simple in struc tions are a ru di men tary tem plate. You have de signed the or ga ni za tion of the project for the students.
However, you might go fur ther and ac tually create the slides for them, giv - ing your students di rections about how to fill in the picture and the text. See Fig - ure 10.1 for an example.
Figure 10.1. Tem plate for An imal Pro ject
Although this is not a com plex pro ject, it might be a good one for second graders, for example, who are first be ing in troduced to PowerPoint. This pro ject does not re quire VBA or hyperlinks or an imations or any thing but the most ba sic features of PowerPoint. For a class of students who are new to PowerPoint, by getting them started you can save them hours of computer work and allow them to con centrate on the content.
As projects be come more complex, tem plates become more powerful. You might want to introduce your stu dents slowly to ad vanced features of PowerPoint, or you might not want to in troduce them to some features at all. But you might want them to take full ad vantage of these features right away.
In Chapter 8 we saw ex amples of pro jects that easily can be turned into tem- plates. You might want your students to write quizzes with all the features of VBA that we discussed, but you might not want them to have to deal with VBA. Using the examples from Chap ter 8, you can set up a template with no questions or a fake question and give your students in structions about how to add slides and tie the but tons to the ap propriate pro cedures. For the mul tiple-choice ex am- ples, they don’t need to change the VBA code at all.
As an other tem plate example, chapter 7 of Agnew, Kellerman, and Meyer (1996) discusses a cur rent events pro ject. In this pro ject, each student or group of stu dents creates a single slide about a current event. The slide contains a brief paragraph about the event and a but ton for the ci tation and pho tograph of the event. This project could be done as a tem plate in which the teacher creates all the parts of the pro ject and the stu dents simply add the pic tures, ci tations, and news sum maries. In the end, all the slides are put to gether to form a class collection of current events.
Many top ics would work well in a template for mat. Pro jects that work es- pecially well are ones in which you would like the stu dents to in clude a fixed body of in formation, and each stu dent or group in cludes the same kind of infor- mation about a dif ferent topic. For ex ample, school clubs, U.S. presidents, coun - tries in Eu rope, Spanish verbs, and state flags are all top ics that lend themselves well to templates.