From the teachers’ perspective: A way of simplicity for multimedia design

The most frequently selected items from teachers' views about creating their own Multimedia are presented in Table 1.

Teachers views about creating their own Multimedia	%	f
I can quickly and easily create my own multimedia by using “copy” and “paste”	88	8
I work with diverse learning skills groups so I can present my own voice, videos, interactive questions and flash animations in my own multimedia to make my lessons more attractive and more interesting	67	6
I will split the class up into teams. I will prepare interactive questions and the students will have to try and guess the correct answer for each question. I think they will enjoy this kind of teaching.	56	5
It is too hard to write subjects and questions, especially those that contain pictures on the blackboard. As a physics/chemistry/science and technology/math teacher, I will present text and questions using my own multimedia without writing on the blackboard. I will use them all my other classes.	56	5
I can show dangerous, difficult, expensive or time consuming experiments not normally possible in the laboratory	33	3
I used to use PowerPoint for presenting and teaching my lesson. I think it has all features of Captivate 3 program except for rapidly questioning.	33	3

When the views reported by the teachers were analyzed, a vast majority of teachers (88%) indicated that creating their own multimedia using Adobe Captivate 3 was very easy. Although Adobe Captivate 3 include more features than PowerPoint, some teachers (33%) claimed it did not, except for rapidly questioning.

As seen in Table 1, the majority of teachers (67%) indicated that they had diverse learning skills groups in their classes. Hence, they were satisfied to create multimedia with their own materials to help their students who were concerned about lessons. However, 56% of respondents thought that they could provide more interesting lessons by teaching through interactive questions and splitting the class into teams. Moreover, most (67%) stated that they could provide more student interest in the concepts and processes of science through animations, graphics, sounds, movies and interactive questions. The findings appeared to suggest that all the teachers were satisfied to create own multimedia because self-made multimedia allows teachers to share their experiences with their own teaching materials. The findings are similar to what is found by other researchers (Barker & Tucker, 1990; Slawson, 1993; Norton and Sprague, 2001; Alyazı and Gürsoy, 2002).).

More than half of the teachers (56%) indicate that writing text and drawing graphics and pictures took a long period of time, during which time little substantive learning took place. They thought that multimedia programs could help easily and quickly complete routine tasks, and they save time in order to work on other activities. Additionally, 33% of teachers added that they could show dangerous, difficult, expensive or time consuming experiments not normally possible in the laboratory through multimedia. Teachers thought that their students seemed to have a better grasp of the material covered by the computer-based materials than they had when the same material was taught using more traditional methods. These findings confirmed the findings of Jonassen et al about computer use in schools (1999).

All participant teachers were aware of developing their technological literacy, technological awareness and technological capability to use information technology. A study by Baker (1994) supports these findings.