Technology Across the Curriculum: Activities and Ideas »

Motivate students and add excitement to learning with these 75 teacher-designed, classroom-tested, and ready-to-use activities. Focusing on curriculum application and integration, the authors provide simple instructions and reproducible activity sheets for video, audio, and multimedia production; computer projects; and photographic/transparency activities. These projects are designed to encourage and involve students in creative, cooperative, integrated, authentic, student-centered learning. For each activity there are objectives, an overview, a definition of skill areas covered, a materials checklist, adaptive ideas, procedure guidelines, and evaluation techniques. Whether your technology setup is basic or sophisticated, this book is for you. Grades 1-12.

VOYA

Technology Across the Curriculum is a carefully organized, thoughtful exploration of multimedia that focuses on "curricular applications of student media productions," with the emphasis on what is done "with various media to make them part of learning." The book is divided into the following media categories: video, photography/transparency, audio, computer, and multimedia, with each category containing fifteen lesson plans. While these plans are presented as "activities," each includes an Objective, an Overview, identified Skill Areas, a Materials Checklist, Adaptive Ideas for using the activity with different age groups, step-by-step Procedures, and a selection of Evaluation ideas. Each category is prefaced by a succinct presentation of the educational value of integrating that particular category of media into students' learning experiences, along with a summary of basic production skills for that media type, and a suggested Extracurricular Event that showcases student production in that media area. The book includes appendices for handouts, extra equipment information and "Video Editing on a Shoestring," classroom management tips, and a bibliography of media production books for teachers, as well as a skills areas index and an author/title/subject index. Multimedia Activities for Students is a "collection of multimedia ideas and activities" that focus on creative curricular applications of a variety of information technologies. A diverse range of exercises and activities are presented, along with worksheets for duplication and extensive resource listings. But the theoretical understanding of those activities is oversimplified to the point of confusion. For instance, Sorrow writes, "Before you purchase a program, goals and objectives need to be written by a multimedia team of educators and students," and she follows that statement with an incredibly understated summary of the media production process, leaving the reader confused as to what is at issue-the purchase or the production. The book's organization is weak, presenting in the "Technology" chapter a series of six very simple exercises (ranging from four steps to nine steps) for producing a slide presentation using Power Point (version not identified); in the "Information" chapter six information search strategy exercises; and in the "Cooperative Learning with Multimedia" chapter twenty-three information-gathering activities in no apparent order. The few illustrations of computer screens are of extremely poor quality. The activities, however, are useful: the famous literary characters research activity includes a 61/2-page dictionary of famous literary characters; and the famous quotations activity includes six pages of famous quotes, with their sources. What the book does offer is an extensive selection of resources (eighty-six of the 191 pages are resource listings) that include computer software programs, CD-ROM products, contact information for distributors and producers, a concise, comprehensive glossary, and a compendium of Internet sites and search tools. The bibliography also is extensive, although print sources cited in the main text are not included in the bibliography. Both books espouse the sharing of multimedia activities. Sorrow's focuses on resources and activity ideas, primarily looking at computer programs, CD-ROMs, and Internet resources. Bazeli and Heintz stress curricular integration of various communication media. Both books purport to present activities that can easily be modified across grade levels, but lessons in Technology Across the Curriculum can more readily be utilized in elementary through high school settings, while Multimedia Activities has a middle-grades emphasis. Both share a variety of worksheets for photocopying: Sorrow's are activity-related, may need some adaptation depending on resources available, and will require enlargement; Bazeli and Heinz's are full size and include a variety of evaluation sheets and some guidelines for scripting and dialogue writing. Purchase the Sorrow book if you require a tool that is resource rich; purchase Bazeli and Heintz's work if you are looking for something that is pedagogically sound and practically accessible. Index. Further Reading. Appendix. Note: This review was written and published to address two titles: Technology Across the Curriculum and Multimedia Activities for Students: A Teachers' and Librarians' Handbook.