Multimedia in Education

This thesis aims to provide an overall picture of multimedia surveying its application in education, especially in language learning, and examines some of the effect the teacher and the students have on classroom interaction. All the results and descriptions of experiments may reduce our fear and aversion to the computer and convince us of its significance as a powerful tool for the development of personal knowledge. After studying of the researches we can be thoroughly acquainted with the main characteristics of multimedia that have great potential for teaching and learning: it allows huge collection of information in a variety of media to be stored in extremely compact form and accessed easily and rapidly. Multimedia offers also a fluid environment requiring students to constantly make decisions and evaluate progress, thus helping them to apply higher order thinking skills. However, the ultimate purpose of computing should not be to turn people into servants of the computer but to develop in them those qualities which are unique to men. Our shools must be changed from traditional isolated learning in the classroom into ‘laboratories’ of active coorperation with the new technology. The present challenge is to investigate how the new information technology can expand the educational possibilities.