Intermedia - Multimedia Writing on the Internet
Intermedia - Publishing Electronically on the Internet
For a school or district with a direct Internet connection, creating an server where students and staff can store electronic versions of documents is now a reality. Shareware such as FTPd allows any Macintosh to become an FTP or Gopher server. MacHTTP (commercially available as WebSTAR) allows your Macintosh to be a "Web" server, capable of delivering hypertext documents. Through the use of HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), students and staff are able to produce documents that combine text, graphics and sounds that are accessible by other users on the Internet, regardless of the type of computer. The growing popularity of the World Wide Web, and, in particular, graphical browsers such as MacWeb and Netscape, have opened up the Internet to the world of multimedia, where a piece of information is no more than a click away. Much as local-based multimedia software packages have opened up a new world of creating and delivering reports, HTML markup and "Internet-aware" packages such as HyperStudio will open up the Internet to a huge array of K-12 produced and delivered hypermedia-based instructional materials.

Preparing Presentations from Internet Information Once you've "skied" into the Internet, you've committed to using electronic means of finding and retrieving information in a variety of forms: text, graphics, sounds and even animations and movies. To present information as varied as this in a cohesive fashion, you'll need to help your students (and possibly yourself) change their mode of gathering and synthesizing facts. Hopefully, everyone will appreciate that there exists an immense amount of information on just about any subject, so the days of "single source" reports should be over. Along with accessing this wide variety of information sources comes the need to cite appropriately where the information has come from. The focus should be on making thoughtful decisions about the information that has been read, seen, and heard and then being able to present the final thoughts in a true hypermedia fashion without constraints due to computer software that doesn't allow for easy student use. In this fashion, the examples presented today were "hypersynthesized" using a software product available for the Macintosh and Windows operating systems called HyperStudio. Allowing students (and staff) to present their findings in such a dynamic fashion will only increase the use of the Internet and other electronic sources as we broaden our outlook on the world and the information it contains to enable our students to make interesting and authentic discoveries.

The "Ultimate" Interactive Internet Experience The "fine line" we now have to ski in the K-12 arena is how to provide a medium that not only allows for the integration of a wide variety of media sources based "locally", but also makes connecting to active Internet resources part of the process. The true multimedia writing experience must now combine these two wonderful processes directly. HyperStudio is the most "Internet-aware" authoring package available on both the Macintosh and Windows platforms. HyperStudio allows the importing of GIF and JPEG graphic files directly, the use of MOD and WAV sound files directly plus the easy playing of ".au" sounds and has now developed to the point where your button connections can "reference" FTP files (including other stacks) directly and make using World Wide Web pages in your HyperStudio stack as easy as connecting to another card. Since the whole point of having access to the Internet for staff and students is to increase the amount and the timeliness of accessible information, it only makes sense to encourage them to use those resources directly in their reports and presentations.

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