DEDOS: An Authoring Toolkit to Create Educational Multimedia Activities for Multiple Devices

Abstract

Information and Communication Technologies offer new possibilities for teachers to enhance their teaching methods. The increasing use of personal computers, tablets, interactive whiteboards, or even multitouch tabletops in the classrooms seems to attract the interest of the students. However, there are not many tools that allow teachers to create multimedia activities for all these technologies in an effortless way. Most of current authoring tools either focus on creating content for only one device or they do not fully exploit the benefits of rich content for designing engaging educational activities. In this paper, we present an authoring toolkit composed by two applications: DEDOS-Editor, which allow teachers to design their own learning activities, and DEDOS-Web, which allows the students to perform those activities adapting them to multiple devices. To test both tools, we have performed two evaluations. One with teachers to test the authoring tools and a second one with primary school students to test if the activities designed with this tool enhance their learning process. Results show that DEDOS-Editor is an easy to learn authoring tool which helps teachers to complement their learning methods while DEDOS-Web is flexible enough to create several learning scenarios from just one set of activities, factors which lead to achieving positive learning outcomes.