Using authoring software in MFL

Organisational issues

When creating interactive materials:

• ensure activities meet specific objectives, whether for an individual class or at the level of the department
• balance activities so that students are not always exposed to the same type of exercise. Design activities so that students move from straightforward word recognition to more demanding comprehension exercises.
• respond to different learning styles among students by incorporating images and audio into interactive materials
• take advantage of the ease of creating interactive materials to construct differentiated exercises to meet the differing levels of ability among students

When working with authoring software

• ensure that the licence for the authoring software is adequate to meet all needs, current and future
• store activities in a shared resource bank so that colleagues can use and adapt what has been created. In this way, work is shared while resources grow.
• store interactive materials for students in an easily accessible folder on the school network or VLE
• check that the network can support multiple simultaneous access to interactive materials with substantial multimedia content
• if using digital photographs, save the image files at low quality in order to reduce file size.  An alternative approach is to set digital cameras to a low resolution
• if using sound recordings, save them as mp3 files. This reduces their size considerably. 
• reduce the workload. Check on the Internet for free interactive resources. Many school create interactive materials with a range of authoring software and make the resource available for general use from their website. (See Resources)