Two years ago, creating "sound and picture" slideshows to put on the web was strictly for the technologically advanced. Those that were produced took forever to download and were barely audible to anyone listening to them from a computer at home.

All that has changed. New and very easy-to-use tools are available to the comparative novice for little or no cost. With them, one can produce multimedia narrated slideshows that "stream" -- that is, start playing as soon as the beginning of the file reaches the host computer and continue to play until they are done. These sophisticated multimedia slideshows can be made by anyone. You don't need to know HTML, and you can use hardware most consumers already own.

One of these tools is called RealProducer. It is free software from RealNetworks. In this SIANME forum four instructors will demonstrate how they used it to "talk" to their students via the web to convey information, depict processes, or demonstrate language pronunciation.