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.