First, a note about the difference between multimedia and hypertext software.
Hypertext is defined by Huntington Lyman (a secondary English teacher/English Ed. doctoral student) in his Jan. 1998 English Journal article "The Promise and Problems of English On-Line: A Primer for High School Teachers," this way:

Hypertext, the language of the World Wide Web, allows individual words, strings of words, or images to serve as links. The target for a hypertext link might be a different section of a document or a different document altogether. Hypertext permits a document to be connected to an infinite number of other documents, thus providing the foundation for the metaphor of the Web. While hypertext is most obviously a convenient navigation aid, it has profound potential benefits for language arts instruction. (58)

Director 8 K-12 Edition
This program, made by Macromedia, whose products my sister the graphic artist swears by, is the granddaddy of all multimedia authoring tools. While HyperStudio operates on the metaphor of a stack of cards, this program's metaphor is film making, with casts of characters, sprites (probably a term more familiar to film geeks - no offense intended!- than to English teachers) and frames of animation. According to Macromedia, "Director movies are interactive multimedia pieces that can include animation, sound, text, digital video, and many other types of media. A movie can be as small and simple as an animated logo or as complex as an online chat room or game." These movies are played in Shockwave format, either in a web page or as a stand-alone application directly in the user's local computer. The author can either import files or create their own pictures, text, and animation with a cool paint tool right in the program. Admittedly, learning this program is going to take some time and commitment on the part of both teachers and students, and would merit a trip to a training workshop. But if you love learning this sort of thing, the possibilities are endless, as is the list of companion software to enhance this program. I have a sample disk with 10 programs from Macromedia, which they give out at graphic arts trade shows. I hope they are doing the same at educational technology conferences. The price for the educational version is not bad at all. This one is definitely on my wish list.

PowerPoint or Freelance
    PowerPoint, a Microsoft product, is the industry standard presentation tool. Freelance is Lotus' version, but they are almost identical. My school has Lotus SmartSuite 97 on the network, but I think more and more schools are going with Microsoft Office, due to Bill Gates savvy marketing ploys (educational giveaways and "Give me a child of 7 and I'll give you a Microsoft user for life."). Anyway, these programs are designed to be used as slide shows projected on-screen to accompany business presentations. When you look at the templates and backgrounds, this becomes obvious. They are fairly easy to use, but the major drawback in my opinion is that they are linear. What this means is that they are designed to show one slide after the other, thus eliminating the infinite linkage possibilities inherent in hypertext. It's possible that later versions have solved this problem, but I have seen student web pages based on PowerPoint presentations which take forever to download and whose text is nearly impossible to decipher online. You can import graphics and sound, though. If you want your students to create business-like slide presentations, these programs are for you.

mPower
    I downloaded a demo version of this product from the manufacturer and was able to play with it. It creates "slides" much the same way that Microsoft PowerPoint or Lotus Freelance does (if you've used either of these, the canned backgrounds will look very familiar). I found it simple and easy to learn, but the downside of this simplicity is a lack of flexibility. For example, when you create a "hot button" (a link to another slide, an audio/video clip, or a web site) you do not have the option to resize, name, or add a text or graphic to it the way you would be able to in HyperStudio or on a web authoring program like Netscape Composer or Dreamweaver. Tom Snyder's web site provides a handy comparison of this program to HyperStudio 4.0 and PowerPoint 98 which lists "one button HTML conversion to publish easily on the Web", "Network version available", and "multiple transitions on one slide" as unique features of this product. However, both HyperStudio and PowerPoint do these things, just in different ways. Tom Snyder has a slick, professional looking web site, making this product look appealing to educators, but I think this is really just a hybrid of PowerPoint and HyperStudio which isn't really as useful as either of them.

Xantippe
This program is advertised by its makers as "The Information Structuring Workbench," and is described as a hypertext/hypergraphics authoring environment for Windows 3.x. It operates on a card file metaphor, much like HyperStudio. It also has the capability to create HTML files for the internet. I haven't seen it, so I can't say much about how well it works or how easy it is to learn, but the cool thing is that they offer a shareware version for $15, so you wouldn't be out a bundle if you bought it and found that it did not work for you.

Note: These programs represent the best of what I found to be available for use in secondary English at the time of this project (April 2001). For a more extensive, broader (PK-16 and all subjects), and continually updated list of software reviews done by educators, you can go to EvaluTech, a site maintained by the Southern Region Education Board. They also have a page called Other Evaluation Resources which will link you to other educational software evaluation sites, the most useful of which I found was the Florida Educational Software Project.

If you teach in a public school in Georgia, you can check out the UGA Technology Training Center's web site for current information on how you can attend technology training relevant to your classroom situation. Look on your state's Dept. of Ed. web site for a training center near you! (The address is usually www.doe.K12.yourstate'stwoletterabbreviation.us)

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