PEDACTICE - Educational Multimedia in Compulsory School : from Pedagogical Assessment to Product Assessment

Developing European educational technologies
Pedactice accelerates the process of innovation in teaching by inviting teachers and producers to engage in continuous feedback between users and producers on assessments and other pedagogical-technological items, by offering schools free access to products for testing and assessment.
The vast body of generated knowledge is the basis of a user-friendly Internet database, the European Multimedia Resource Library (EMRL), which is being constructed during the project.

Building collaboration
The project introduces educational multimedia products into a considerable number of schools and creates teacher teams for supporting their use and experimentation in the classroom. In doing so, it takes advantage of existing collaboration between university colleges and compulsory schools, the latter representing large and small-scale users and including experimental environments for educational multimedia. One teacher from each school is affiliated part-time to the university college and represents the school's interests and expertise to the partners.
The research tasks are to study the complex relations between human learning processes, teaching strategies and the pedagogical efficiency of multimedia products. The subject areas of the educational multimedia products assessed are science, mathematics, language and culture at compulsory school level. The results are integrated into the Library, the design of which is moulded by all the potential user interests.
To the schools, the project gives support in the use of educational multimedia and familiarises teachers with assessing products and exploiting their innovative potential i.e. with respect to developing their own content sets of multimedia tools. To the universities charged with teacher training, the Library offers a dynamic pedagogical forum and a scientific platform by which to introduce, to experiment and to develop best practices, and to organise new teacher training programmes. Finally, the producers will develop a strategic instrument for adapting to the requirements of the pedagogical market and for improving their market position.

Development of a European Multimedia Resource Library (EMRL)
Internet database, assessment resources
Compulsory schools, teachers
Improved access, assessment tools, resources for educational multimedia
Internet, databases, e-mail