iWeb: Multimedia Education Activity Design Oxford

Harcourt Education

Harcourt Education is an international publishing group with operations in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Southern Africa and South-East Asia. Their goal is to support teachers in their delivery of government initiatives, such as the National Literacy and Numeracy strategies.

Operating in the UK under the well known Heinemann name, Harcourt is headquartered in Oxford and employs some 900 people around the world.

Project overview

As a leading provider of educational materials for primary schools in the UK, Harcourt required the development of a series of interactive CD-ROMs to teach 5-11 year olds all about literacy.

After a thorough assessment of the options available to produce this resource, Harcourt decided to commission Interactive Web Solutions to design and author the CD-ROMs.

Utilising our considerable experience in this field we proposed a solution that included 3 stories on each CD-ROM: fiction, non-fiction and mystery.

The solution included:

• Very graphical interfaces that make extensive use of animation, video and audio
• Interactive functionality to engage the children as much as possible and make the learning experience fun
• Comprehensive teacher management system that monitors the work that each child has completed
• Capability for the children to make notes as they read a story

The CD-ROMs were designed to run on both a stand-alone PC and in a network environment.

The completed package was entered for the 2006 BETT awards - the definitive showcase for innovative and effective ICT education resources – and was highly commended for interactive literacy: multimedia reading, in the English Key stage 1 and 2 category.

What the client had to say

Seb Burge, Senior Electronic Designer at Harcourt commented:

“Working with Interactive Web Solutions was very straightforward. They were able to take our ideas and concepts and turn them into an engaging and challenging educational resource. Their expertise and product knowledge were a key factor in choosing to partner with them and certainly played an important part in achieving the BETT commendation.”