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July 1, 1999
Kids World: A Collaborative Multimedia Magazine
By Nader Ghali
In the spring of 1997, my sixth-grade English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students put together their first multimedia title. Kids World-as its creators eagerly dubbed it-was a multimedia magazine, an electronic document with the format of a print publication. The computer program showcased my students' literary and artistic talents; it featured articles, stories, jokes, recipes, and the recordings of two of my students, whose voices launched the software with the greeting, "Welcome to Kids World Magazine!"
This learning technology success story took place in the Pelita Harapan school, a private K-12 school just outside of Jakarta, Indonesia. Pelita Harapan is an Indonesian magnet school with 800 students. The school seeks to bring together the best of Western educational methods to its pupils. Along with fifty other American and Australian teachers, I taught English, Computers, and Character Education to advanced-level EFL students. Many of these students had lived or traveled abroad, were quite proficient in English already, and needed the challenges of more creative and collaborative learning experiences in English.
Kids World actually began as a simple class magazine. But that year, 25 brand-new Pentium computers had been donated to the school, all multimedia ready. As I considered our new technology resources, I asked my students, "How would you like to put Kids World on each of our new computers?" They cheered in unison, and so was born our multimedia project.
The most important aspect of this project, besides how we finally authored the computer program, was organization. We brainstormed a list of possible topics for the contents of the magazine, and I delegated assignments to various students. Nicol wrote the feature article, "Animals on the Brink of Extinction," and Rani, ever prolific, wrote a humorous short story about computers, called "Nerd Town." Other students wrote puzzles and filler-type materials. Some students worked alone while others worked in groups.
I made out a progress chart to keep track of where students were in the production process, whether they were drafting, editing, or revising. Students whose work was polished and ready to be published handed me their final drafts on floppy diskettes. Then I imported the data from there into the computer program. For students who produced artwork by hand instead of by using the computer, I scanned their final copies and used Microsoft Paint to touch up the images and save them in bitmap format.
I used Visual Basic, a computer programming language, to create the Kids World computer program. I had a copy of Visual Basic from my "geek" days as a computer hobbyist, and it was simple enough for me to use. Many of the students who wrote pieces for the magazine used Microsoft Creative Writer, because it embellished their work with colorful fonts and fancy clip art. Cindy and Dian used Sound Recorder and a microphone to record the welcome greeting. A fellow Australian teacher, who had authored his own educational software, reviewed the work in progress and lent me valuable advice on the final production.
We completed Kids World, and I installed the final program on our lab PCs and demonstrated it to parents during conference time. They responded enthusiastically at this merger of collaborative learning and technology. Students also got their own copies of the program on floppy disks to install on their home computers. Students from other classes who came to use the computers often marveled when they discovered Kids World on the Start button! They read the articles and stories, surprised to see the names of their sixth-grade buddies as bylines.
Later that year, I served on a Computer Curriculum Committee for the school, with the responsibility of drawing up a set of guidelines for the objectives of the computer program. Because the new PCs came equipped with PowerPoint, we agreed to train teachers on how to use the software as a multimedia authoring tool. These teachers then taught their students how to use PowerPoint to develop their own individual multimedia productions.
We were able to accomplish these results by taking inventory of what technology resources we had and using them. I believe that with the same determination, and a bit of organization, any school can leverage its existing learning technology resources to produce similar results.
Email: Nader Ghali
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