Abstract:

Multimedia has firmly entered our lives, and the field of education is not an exception. Learning materials containing multimedia elements such as pictures, video clips or audio files are employed in education. In this paper, we aimed to study in what learning activities and why Estonian school teachers use such materials. In addition, we were interested in tools that teachers use to create learning materials with multimedia elements. The results showed that Estonian teachers use this kind of learning materials mainly in new topic explanation and their reviewing. The main reasons for using these materials in the learning process are the possibility of making lessons more exciting, and employing the attractivity of these learning materials to arouse greater interest in the topics taught. Also, school teachers point out that learning materials containing multimedia help supplement already existing learning materials. However, specific requirement in technical skills and prior knowledge may cause for teachers the difficulty in the creation of such materials. Nevertheless, more than half of the respondents used learning materials containing multimedia in every or almost in every lesson. Regarding used tools, teachers use variety of software and web-based environments. The collected data were also analysed in terms of teacher’s gender, field of teaching subject and teaching grade. Some statistically significant differences in results occurred between teachers’ groups from different fields of teaching subject. However, no significant differences in results were found in terms of teachers’ gender and teaching grades.

Keywords:

Multimedia, learning materials, secondary education.