Hypermedia in Education: children as audience or authors?

When teachers reflect on their teaching, their most lasting memories are when students have struggled with knowledge and constructed their own understandings, discovered relationships, and articulated original ideas – original, at least, in the child’s perspective. Teachers want students to build a relationship with information, to analyse and critique others’ ideas and then invent and develop their own understandings. Teachers want students to experience the joy of discovery and the pride of creativity. Our experience and that of other researchers and classroom teachers has shown that using hypermedia authoring tools in the classroom can be a powerful stimulus for students to engage in this type of learning.