The participants
The seven members of our workshop represent five countries and, all but one, specialize in physics / physics education. Members varied in several dimensions: role (MM developer, teacher, teacher trainer), level of teaching (from primary school to University), experience (& age) in developing, evaluating and using MM and IT in teaching, teaching styles. The different perspectives were reflected during the discussion in various ways, and enabled us to examine our issue from different points of view.

The Workshop
The initial thematic questions were:
How to help teachers use MM effectively, in order to improve their own practice?
Can MM offer advantages to the Teacher Training process ?

The first workshop session was dedicated to the following:

• Establishing an agreed "vocabulary". This episode reflects the common confusion about the terms involved - what is MM ?
• Reviewing the issues presented in the panel session presentations.
• Examining and comparing few selected examples of MM for physics teaching.

The second session dealt with the following issues:
Evaluating MM Materials:

• The need for characterizing scheme and for evaluation criteria for MM.
• Examining a proposed set of criteria presented by the workshop leader, and applying them on sample examples of MM (on-screen experiments, simulations).

Using MM materials:

• Why is the use of MM by teachers so limited in spite of the abundance of materials that are available in all countries represented by the participants?

After describing the situation in our respective countries, we arrived at the same conclusions as the "New Technologies and Learning Physics" workshop in the 2001 GIREP seminar regarding the four necessary aspects that need to be addressed in order to enable effective use of IT (page 125). The fourth aspect is compulsory teacher training – the theme of this seminar.

Teacher Training
Two complementary approaches to effective training and support of teachers were suggested:

1. Providing teachers with high quality, refereed/ evaluated materials that can be used immediately, with a minimal additional effort. Such materials can contain single MM products, integrated lesson plans and “instructional paths”, student centered activities, additional resources, background material etc.
2. Providing teachers with general knowledge and skills that will enable them to evaluate existing materials and to adapt them to their specific needs. Our workshop participants presented training models that lead to the construction of instructional MM products (e.g. short multimedia presentations, comprehensive multimedia books, problem-focused student activities).

Differences related to teaching experience (Pre vs. In-service): Pre-service teachers lack school experience while in-service teachers are reserved using MM, at least partially. However, the goals/aims in teacher training on MM are important for both groups.

Matching MM materials to teaching style and instructional context: As any teaching aid, a specific MM item can be used in many different ways.

Perspectives of MM developers
Following the presentation of one of the group members, we tried to look at MM from the perspective of the material developers, asking: What are the goals of MM developers (regarding the teacher)?
The participants expressed two polarized approaches:

1. Empowering the teacher (in various ways)
2. "Bypassing" the teacher offering him little or no control.

The second approach applies to the younger group level (elementary, junior high) and is based on the assumption that the quality of teachers is low (lack the subject matter knowledge) and so are the chances to change the situation. Therefore, some MM developers address students directly, regarding their products as a kind of replacement to the teacher.
The key to the actual implementation of any material in school, even as a complementary "supporting" activity, is the teacher. A teacher who is not confident enough to cope with a certain subject will anyway feel reluctant to expose his/her students to such materials, or to using MM. As a result, such MM materials will eventually be used only by the high quality (and highly motivated) teachers, and will not serve their originally meant purpose – to compensate for the teachers’ lack of proficiency.

Benefits and challenges of Evaluating MM Materials as part of the Teacher Training program.
Evaluation of the material itself may be helpful as a kick-out to separate well thought and well produced material from “low quality” which can be found in large amount distributed in the web or offered by companies.
It can serve developers of MM collections in preparing quality materials.
Using evaluation templates can be a method of acquainting teachers with the relevant aspects and appropriate terminology.

Evaluating the item itself does not necessarily promise its optimal use in the actual teaching –learning process. Such optimal use depends on many factors, that should all be taken into account when considering what to use, how, and with whom.
Two examples of such cases from the participants' experience highlighted the issue:

1. MM materials that were found highly efficient for distance students have gained low popularity amongst the campus students of the same course.
2. MM materials provided to high ability students to support problem solving were regarded as unnecessary while similar tools were found very effective for lower level students.

Can MM offer advantages to the Teacher Training Process?
Ways to use MM:

• As a teaching and learning aid for dealing with subject matter issues (direct experience as students).
• Aids for Didactics and Methodics (such as analyzing filmed case studies and interactive activities based on MM materials).

Two General Issues
The current situation with MM is seems to be repeating the first attempts to incorporate computers into teaching and learning in the 1980: Growing abundance of materials and now also of databases of materials of wide-spread quality.

The major benefit from trying to find ways to use the new technologies effectively is that it creates the need, therefore the opportunity, to reflect on our own practice (as teachers, curriculum developers, teacher trainers).

Recommendations

• Creating reviewed MM material database accessible to teachers of different nations in their native languages.
• Developing appropriate evaluation criteria for the MM materials (e.g. EUPEN working group 5)
• Developing methods for evaluation of the efficacy and the outcomes of using MM (cognitive, motivational…)
• Dedicating significant effort & funding on evaluation of existing MM materials.
• Evaluation of MM should include objective (not only by the developers) field testing.
• Lessons learned from the experience gained during the last 20 years with incorporating IT in the teaching-learning process are relevant and recent developers.