AUTHORING TOOL DEVELOPMENT

Effort in this direction is motivated by two factors: Content creation is a huge task requiring imagination and a large number of developers; teachers need to play a key role in content creation

We have been organizing teacher training workshops - where we train teachers to use the authoring tool to develop content. The tool needs to be easy to learn and use. Further, for it to reach a large audience it needs to be open-source based and platform independent. After weighing various options we came upon a tool that fits our requirements. The authoring tool is called SQUEAK.

SQUEAK has all the functionalities required of a good authoring tool. It embeds all the required media types. Selection of all the tools can be done using the drag-n-drop functionality.

Customisation work of Squeak is aimed at extending the features of SQUEAK to support Indian Language fonts, and enhance its support for media types created by various application software packages. This activity is funded by Media Lab Asia ( www. media lab asia .org ).

A snap shot of SQUEAK is shown below.