Building
Learners
Project

The workBench is a powerful tool for web authoring and collaborating that was designed to make it possible for teachers and students to create and share all kinds of web content. Project ideas and options are open-ended.

As a BLP member, you may embark on an idea that is completely original and that no one has ever done before. One of the roles for our blog will be to help you plan and implement those exciting ideas. As an initial step in thinking about projects, let’s investigate in general terms some of the possibilities that both you and other teachers who are using the workBench have suggested or tried.

Teacher, class, and school websites. Add to the list websites for extracurricular activities: the Chess Club, the Pep Squad, the Save the Earth Club. “Website” suggests a “long-term, or permanent, web presence.” The workBench makes it possible to continually update and expand a website’s content without outside expertise or a daunting commitment of time and energy. Evolving and changing content avoids the shortcoming of many such websites: they often remain static for so long that the information in them becomes stale and dated.

One interesting idea we’ve heard: a guidance counselor wants to create a website to support seniors in the college application process. She wants both English and Spanish versions. To create the second version, she will be able to open the website project in the workBench, do a “Save As,” and immediately make a second copy of the entire website. Then she can substitute Spanish text for the English - or visa versa, and an “English or Spanish” menu can steer students and parents to one version or the other.

Digital literary magazines, class or school newspapers, class or school yearbooks. Shifting traditional publications to a digital environment saves printing costs and can make content accessible online to the whole school community - and the world. An interesting design challenge is to rethink the print versions, which are in a “portrait” (larger vertically) format into a “landscape” (larger horizontally, shaped like a computer screen) format.

Digital versions offer the advantage of making it easy to combine images and text, as well as grow and modify existing content. The workBench makes it possible to download, share, and run such projects offline, so that students can have personal copies of such products on a memory stick or CD that will open offline in a browser window.

Art galleries, portfolios, scrapbooks. At any point while creating a workBench screen, you can copy and paste it - use it like a template – so that you can create a screen with all the common design and navigational elements in it for a gallery, portfolio, or scrapbook. Then copy it and paste it into the same project as many times as you like. Finally, put in the variable content and create the navigational links.

Very important for portfolios is the workBench’s ability to download and run projects offline. A student portfolio on a CD can be sent in with a college application. Any project (better in its zipped, or compressed, form) can be shared as an email attachment as well. The recipient doesn’t need a workBench account to open the project. It travels with it’s own mini-workBench reader.

Student projects. Research in brain and cognitive science has solidly demonstrated that students don’t learn optimally as passive recipients of pre-configured knowledge. They learn best when they have opportunities to evaluate, manipulate, transform, personalize, and share what they are learning.

Essential questions and project-based learning are an outgrowth of this very active and engaged perception of teaching and learning. The workBench’s digital environment makes it possible for students to create projects with rich, multimedia content. It also enables them to plan and work in teams and combine screens into larger group projects that can be shared with fellow students locally and/or online across any distance.

Why not have student create digital resources for peers that evolve over time? Next year’s class reads, uses, and adds to the digital resource library that this year’s class (or the last five year’s classes) created.

In addition to sharing over time, a natural next step in the creating and sharing of student projects is linking classes over a distance and comparing local and distant research about any topic – student life, school, local history, culture, climate, geography, geology, etc.

Pen pals, journals, and homework. You can share workBench projects with an individual or a group simply by dragging and dropping them over the individual’s or group’s icon. The recipient of a shared project then sees it in his or her “Shared with me” list.

Everything in the “Shared with me” list is a reference, like a bookmark. Double-click on a project there, and the other person’s project opens (in reader, not editing, mode). If the person adds to or changes the project, that new information is immediately available.

If two people share projects with each other, they each have an open, one-way channel for sharing web screens back and forth, which is good for pen pals, journals, and digital homework.

It’s easy to add a link in a workBench project to a blog. There may be very interesting ways of combining this open-ended sharing of content with a blog for projects that involve visiting digital scholars and artists.

We haven’t mentioned yet possibilities for teacher teams to create and disseminate curriculum and professional development materials online, support for new teachers in the field through a digital community with open lines of communication, linking organizations that aren’t schools but that have an educational mission (museums, intervention programs, etc.) to schools – once again, the options are really unlimited and open-ended.

Let us know how we can help.

I made a comment on Ron’s ”grabbing logos” post, but thought I’d share an example. Your kids would love to make “about the author” screens at the end of their workBench projects, complete with voice bubbles!

You wouldn’t think that menus and links would spark a lot of imagination, but as it turns out, there are some really interesting examples that have been created in the workBench’s drag-and-drop environment.

The dark red spaces on this Scrabble board, for example, are links to different projects produced by a class of EFL students preparing for college in American.

Making an expansive workBench website is one of their activities for both learning language and academic skills. They photographed the board, uploaded the image, made it a background, added the red boxes and text, and then linked each red box to the opening screen of one of their projects.

There’s a new post on the TRintuition’s blog, investigating menus and ideas for links. I particularly like the use of invisible links over images. If you have a moment, take a look at the post and see if you’re inspired to break away from the traditional.

A very simple student project for a start might contain only a few screen elements on a single screen: a title, a student’s name, a prompt, and a text box, in which the student can respond to the prompt.

In this example, Ogden Nash’s poem about fleas and Adam is the prompt, and an imaginary student has written several lines about the poem, as well as adding a one-line entry into the shortest poem category.

The prompt in such a project could be a photograph, art, a poem, several paragraphs of text - perhaps a short newspaper article - whatever would be engaging and appropriate to get students to reflect, respond, and share.

With younger students it’s possible to create the project and share it with them, so that each of them only has is to write a response in the text box. Then they could share the projects back to the teacher, and all the projects could be combined into a single project, or they all could be linked online from a single menu.

Add an additional prompt, and you create a situation for comparing and contrasting. Through the contrasting photographs, this screen suggests the two sides of nature, how it can be beautiful, yet very destructive.

Screens such as these can be made in a matter of minutes by teachers or students. Start simple. The focus should be on the engagement and responses that can be evoked from students, not on the complexity of building screens and projects.

A second basic type of project has a home page with a menu of perhaps 3 - 5 items. Click on one of the topics in the menu, and you go to another screen that contains that topic’s information, plus a back button to return to the home page. The navigation is very simple and basic - out to a topic, back to home, out to another topic, back to home. Place the back buttons on the topic screens all in the same location, so no one has to hunt for them, and no one will ever get lost.

This example is about gorillas and was created by an older student. It has lots of nice bells and whistles, but the structure is very simple: home page, out and back. The menu on the home page is made up of text on top of a background image. Some of the menu items link to other websites as resources.

To create a project such as our gorilla example on their own, students need to do research and think about their subject and how it breaks into logical topics. It’s a pedagogical challenge first and foremost. What important information exists for the subject, and how can it best be organized?

It’s not unlike trying to organize a composition, in which paragraphs are major building blocks. Here, those blocks are screens, and just as in the world of writing, students progress up a staircase toward more sophisticated results one step at a time.
You can take a look at the gorilla project and see how easy it is to get around at: http:www.trintuition.com/workbenchinfo/gorilla

As I register two new members for this project, I am also preparing to leave later this week for NECC, the National Educational Computing Conference. I will be presenting there about “Spanning the Gap Between Web 2.0 Developers and the Classroom.” This project is an outgrowth of the efforts TeachersFirst has made in spanning that gap, so I will certainly be telling teachers and educational technology professionals from all over the world about this project. I hope we will see some new members as a result. As the summer progresses (northern hemisphere) and winter deepens (southern hemisphere), this is a great time to play with the tools on the workBench and become more comfortable. I spent some time with it last week, creating a project of my own, and I wish I were in a classroom again with some kids to see what they would do with it.

I think about things like creating a visual story prompt or cooperative story: The class and I make the first screen on our interactive whiteboard (thus demonstrating the tools) and “pass it on” by sharing it with the entire class. I’d have to be sure to show them how to COPY an existing screen!  Those in each group could add the next step (illustrated, of course) or branch off a la Choose Your Own Adventure from any previous turning point within the story . The result? A story web that could lead many places. Simply by sharing the project with multiple authors, everyone gets a chance to spin in their own direction yet try to develop narrative lines that might converge at some point. Now add a layer: make the story historical fiction set in a time period you are studying or ABOUT to study (or a parallel story about a minor character from a novel you are reading, or set in the laboratory of a scientist you who is part of your curriculum: Gregor Mendel and His Plants??). What a way to determine prior knowledge and weave new understanding in as your study goes along. The teacher could pepper the Shared Resources with links and images and ask students to determine how they “fit into” the “story” of colonial Boston, for example. As students find other good resources, they can share them among themselves, as well.

And that was just ONE idea that popped in my head. What are you thinking of doing to Build Learners?

I grabbed this logo from the TeachersFirst homepage and inserted it into this post. It’s not difficult to grab a portion of a screen and use it in a workBench project as well. We created a collection of teacher resources, in which logos, or portions of home pages, serve as links to the sites.

We’re not intellectual property lawyers, but our interpretation is that if we use a logo to direct people to its site for educational purposes, it is an example of the Fair Use doctrine and not in violation of copyright laws.

If you haven’t seen it, take a look at our resource collection. Click on any logo, or screen fragment, and the site will open in another window. Close that window, and you’re back to the collection to search further. (You can access the collection at www.trintuition.com/resources also.)

To grab a portion of an open screen on a Mac, hold down Shift-Apple-4. The cursor changes into cross-hairs with a circle in the middle. Drag the modified cursor over any portion of the screen that you want to grab, and when you release the drag, a picture of that section of the screen is produced. It’ll appear on your desktop. (Shift-Apple-3 will take a picture of your whole screen.)

In Mac world, with Tiger (OSX 10.4) and Leopard (OSX 10.5), the file that is created is a PNG, a type of picture file, which can be dragged into the workBench uploader as is and added to your resources and projects. With Panther (OSX 10.3), the file created is a PDF. Open it in Preview and save it as a JPG file before uploading it.

I’m not as familiar with the world of PCs, put apparently Vista has added a Snip tool that captures portions of screens. In earlier Windows operating systems, the Print Screen button (abbreviated sometimes as Prt Scr) is used to capture the entire screen, then that is cropped in a photo-editing application. Apparently you can select a window within a screen, press Alt-Print Screen, and capture only that window.

I’ve used SnagIt on a PC successfully. It isn’t free, but it has the advantage of being able to scroll down and capture a vertically-extended screen completely.

Screen snapshots could be used with younger children to create alphabet books or personal dictionaries. Older students could make resource collections for different topics similar to our teacher resources.

Here’s an example of a project that used small screen shots as links that connect ideas and terms in the text to other web resources.

Please help add to this information about capturing screen “snapshots” and interesting project ideas for their use in the comments.

Eons ago when I was an English department head in a high school, the central office produced a new, detailed K-12 curriculum for Language Arts and English. The curriculum had won awards and been highly touted before it was disseminated to the schools and became the law of the land.

When I read through the 9th-12th grade sections, I was impressed with how comprehensive and inclusive it was. Then as I dug deeper and began to count the goals and objectives, I became dismayed with how comprehensive and inclusive it was. There were literally more defined bits to teach, make meaningful to students, and test than days in the school year.

I don’t know how it started or caught on to be so prevalent and powerful, but somehow the assumption took hold that more is better. If only teachers worked harder and taught more content, education would be better - and so we found ourselves very much like hamsters on exercise wheels that the powers-that-be were making spin faster and faster. Somehow the educational mantra became more with less, more with less.

Years later I found myself developing programs that connected schools to the rich world beyond the schoolyard, to museums, universities, and wonderful cultural events. Such opportunities conflicted teachers. The value was clear, but how could they fit them into a school year that was already stuffed with obligations and deadlines, and in which they chronically felt behind and struggling to catch up? What should I take out of my schedule that is less important than what you want me to add?

Now, more years later, after the arrival of high-stakes testing, technology faces a similar conundrum. Teaching and learning are seen as a zero-sum game, in which any new addition is perceived as triggering a loss somewhere else. The pie is only so big. When one piece gets bigger, another has to get smaller. That’s the perception.

I’ve come to believe that less is often more in teaching - that it is better to cover less content but to have students more deeply engaged and more in control of their learning. Technology projects, done either by individuals or groups, can promote this deeper engagement. Unfortunately less is more often runs counter to the rules under which we work as teachers.

For sure we can make a powerful case for why technology is as (or more) important in educating and preparing children for the future than X, Y, or Z. However, a more productive leap might be right out of the mindset of competition and the zero-sum thinking.

What if we think of technology as a means rather than an end, a set of tools that can enrich and empower all kinds of teaching and learning. Instead of the nay-sayers thinking, those students could be improving their reading skills rather than sitting in a computer lab, think, how can technology help create a community of readers, who reflect on their reading and share those reflections. Reading and technology could be the best of buddies rather than competitors.

This is just a simple, first-step answer, but what if students kept online reading logs, a kind of accumulative class encyclopedia of independent reading, in which they reflected on some grade-level-appropriate aspects of what they had read, perhaps rated the story, the illustrations, and/or other components for their peers. Every student becomes a book critic, and students can read each other’s comments online to help select their next book.

Done well, one can image that such online reading logs could help create a community of readers and make younger students in particular very proud of having a web presence for their ideas and reading accomplishments. Here’s a sample log page for younger students.

In the workBench, it’s possible to create a screen and copy and paste it repeatedly into the same or other projects. It can act like a template, with all the major pieces in place, so that young students could be given a page that was already made. The teacher might change the book cover and title, perhaps some of the colors, and then all the student would have to do is add the text reflections and ratings.

This example is a small sliver of a bigger idea: how to have technology leverage powerful pedagogical advantages rather than be perceived as Cinderella in the ashes before the magic wand arrived.

Please share any ideas you might have along these lines about technology’s powerful ability to engage and support rather than compete. It would be rewarding to figure out together the best ways such projects could be done.

In the true spirit of collaboration (or “emailaboration”), Jonah from TRintuition and I have improved the look and user “feel” of this blog to make it more useful for everyone involved in BLP. Jonah did all the work. I just responded, suggested, and cheered as his changes made it easy for all of us to find what we need and share what we have to say. Then, in the wee hours of this morning his time, Jonah breathed life into the new look by moving it onto the “real” servers. This is the stuff that true geeks and techno-designers thrive on.

So may your students. Never underestimate how much they may be willing to do so their projects have the right “look and feel” to communicate what they want to say. If you ask them to articulate why they are making the changes, you may find that there is far more understanding of the science or social studies or language arts concept they are SUPPOSED to be demonstrating. The visual is more than window dressing, though academia has often forgotten this in its preference for text. Really visual kids need really visual means, and the workBench is a great place to find the tools. That’s why TeachersFirst is happy to be working with them — and with you — to build learners.

I think I have the hang of this tool now…well kind of….but i keep rereading the tutorials and I don’t understand how to upload files into my…oops I forgot what it is called. Anyway I want to make a logo as part of my screens and I just can’t figure out if I can or how to upload.Please advise? I am really enjoying the challenge of this tool…I have been writing html code and have made close to 100 different websites… but I am stuck