Getting to grips with “interactivity”: helping teachers assess the educational value of CD‐ROMs

Abstract

Many commercial CD‐ROMs are now being marketed as suitable for home and school use, increasingly promoted as covering the National Curriculum. However, such promises are failing to be realised because many CD‐ROMS are poorly constructed, consisting simply of a mishmash of images, sounds and video that offer little more than light entertainment. The aim of this paper is to provide guidance on assessing the added value of educational CD‐ROMs compared with traditional materials by explicating more the notion of interactivity as it pertains to learning.