Apple Computer Inc has introduced Visual Almanac, an interactive multimedia demonstration kit that combines videodisk and the Macintosh personal computer with HyperCard: described as an outgrowth of two years of research with children and educators by Apple’s multimedia lab to determine how interactive technologies can best create multisensory environments that address different learning styles, Visual Almanac will be made available as a grant to both educators and education software developers in the autumn; it comprises three sections – Activities, Collections and Composition Workspace, the 14 Activities being prepared demonstrations of useful, curriculum-related content areas and basic teaching principles intended to show how the Almanac can be used by teachers or developers; in the Collections section, a user can view or hear more than 7,000 objects divided into 10 categories of visual images and two categories of sounds, and the Composition Workspace, is for users to do their own research and create reports electronically; Apple says that it has no plans to offer Visual Almanac except as a grant.
