Building
Learners
Project

9

Responses

1. Candace Hackett Shively says July 15th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
   

   Susan,
   As a former teacher of gifted, I love your idea of having the kids enter the “what’s happening” information. Your screens (pages) are visually beautiful. Where did your artwork come from??? It is gorgeous. I imagine that some viewers might want to know more about it. Are you going to allow students to include digital pictures of what is going on (with permission and unidentified, of course)? They can always take pictures from creative angles, avoiding faces, such as close-ups of the hands on the globe or a tabletop full of materials or puzzles. I am sure they’d love the challenge of taking “anonymous” pictures from a different point of view!

   I can’t wait to see what they add as school opens up. Bravo to you for your persistence in learning about the workBench. Now you can pass along your expertise to others who join the project. Any words of advice?

2. slafaso says July 15th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
   

   Thanks Candace for your help and encouragement. I found the pictures on the internet. I am going to have my students do their own drawings of “Reach For The Stars”. There are so many other things that we will do with the website. There is no limit to what they can and will do. And yes, they love taking photos and videos too.

   My only advice is to keep trying and asking questions. I have made many websites in the last 10 years, but I do it the old fashioned way…html code. This was a huge change for me but I think it is a great opportunity for the children.

3. Ron says July 23rd, 2008 at 3:53 pm
   

   Hi Susan,
   I want to compliment you on your emerging website. I really like the colors, the design, and the imaginative links from the art thumbnails.

   I’ll try to give you some practical suggestions.

   On your home page, the text box with “The Green Team Gate” has a scrollbar, because, I suspect, you have some returns under your last line of text. If you delete the returns, the scrollbar will disappear, which may look cleaner. I try to get rid of all unneeded scrollbars.

   This is just a style option to try. On the home page, you have the two text boxes that contain the school names. Click in one of the boxes, then in the Toolbox, slide the Visibility Slider and the Border Slider down to 0. The box and border will disappear, leaving just the text. You might then select the text, open the text Color Chooser, and make it the nice off-white you used in the “Green Team Gate” box. Text can stand completely alone. A visible box and border are an option, not a necessity.

   I might make the boxes and borders invisible for your “Home” buttons as well on your content screens.

   Your site has two screen designs: the home page and the what I mentioned above as a content page, which has a title, a nice piece of art, and a “Home” button.

   I’m not sure how you made all the content pages, but I wanted to mention that you can create one of them, then copy and paste that screen into the project as many times as you like. You can then go back in and change the titles and the art. You don’t have to make screens that have common design elements and features individually. It’s a really fast way to add screens to a project.

   One last suggestion: a couple of the images on the content pages are a little distorted. In general on the Internet, when you make images bigger than their original size, they begin to break up. Making them smaller would make them crisper.

   All of these suggestions are just minor options. Congratulations on an ambitious start in a new direction! Ask any specific questions you might have.

4. slafaso says July 23rd, 2008 at 5:21 pm
   

   Thanks Ron,

   You were right on target with things that bothered me…number one being the scroll bar. I tried finding something that would tell me how to get rid of it…you saved me time.
   I like the idea of getting rid of the boxes around text.
   And i just read about just making one “content” page and copying it and was planning on going back and trying it out.
   Thanks so much for taking the time to be so helpful. I am getting ready to start another whole website and it will be soooooooo much easier this round.

   I am very impressed with your project and the hands on help you offer. I am looking forward to seeing other projects.

   Thanks again, Susan

5. Ron says July 24th, 2008 at 10:40 am
   

   Hi Susan,

   I think the changes you made look wonderful. Crisp and clean and sharp.

   I have one more hint that might be useful to you. I really like how you’ve combined text and an image in your menu - for example, “Kindergarten” followed by a thumbnail of art.

   As you now have the menu, the thumbnail of art is the link. Without changing the look of the menu in any way, you can make it so that the word “Kindergarten” and the art are a larger link together. It involves what we call in the tutorial an “invisible link.”

   Drag in a box and drop it in your homepage menu on top of “Kindergarten.” Click on it to select it - but don’t click on the “T” to add text. Use the resizing handles, the white boxes in the corners, to resize it into a rectangle that covers “Kindergarten” and the art thumbnail. With the box selected (resizing handles showing), link the box to your Kindergarten page in the Sitemap by dragging the linking arrow down over the Kindergarten screen icon in the Sitemap.

   With the box still selected, go to the Toolbox and drag the Visibility and Boarder sliders down to 0. The box disappears, but the link is still there. You’ve made a kind of invisible hot zone over both the word and the image. Roll over it in preview mode, and the cursor changes to indicate a link. You might try this idea on your content pages as well for the “Home” button.

   Remember that you have a box, even though you can’t see it, on top of your “Kindergarten” and art thumbnail. To change the word “Kindergarten” or to put in a different piece of art, click on the invisible box and push the Visibility slider up some so that you can see the box. Drag it temporarily out of the way to another part of the Canvas. Make your changes, then move the box back into position, and make it invisible again.

   One additional note: you can’t make a box a link if there is text in it. When you’re trying to make an invisible link, if you accidentally click on the “T” to add text, just delete “Type here,” click outside the box, and then back in it, and you can link the box.

   Just another technique to add to your thinking.

   We need to explain getting rid of scrollbars in the tutorial material somewhere. That’s your important discovery for us - that’s it’s not there. With help like yours, we’ll keep filling in those gaps.

   Ask any questions you encounter!

   Ron

6. slafaso says July 26th, 2008 at 8:38 am
   

   Thanks Ron, The invisible boxes are great. Looks much more professional. This is soooooooooooo much fun..with your help of course.

   I now have another problem. I decided to link to my school website. So I thought I followed the directions, but it just doesn’t work. Any suggestions? I did use the link to a url tool and the links show up in the site map…could it be that my school website is blocking the link from working?

7. slafaso says July 27th, 2008 at 9:42 am
   

   oops, I figured out why it didn’t link to my school website. It’s the same old Mozilla Firefox problem, new screens open behind the front one. It works fine using Internet Explorer.

8. Ron says July 28th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
   

   Hi Susan, sorry for the delay in responding. I’ve been very busy creating video tutorials and didn’t get back to our blog until now. We want to replace a lot of our text tutorials with video to make learning how to use all the workBench’s tools easier.

   Wonderful that you answered your own question. I bumped into the exact same problem and had trouble figuring it out initially too, similar to you.

   Can I offer you one more hint, again just an experiment to try? Put shadows behind the big images on your content pages. It’s # 3d in the main menu for the Canvas Tutorial. They’ll look as if they’re in front of the background. It’s a nice 3-dimensional look.

   (I never noticed until now that our shadow tutorial for making things seem 3-dimensional is #3d in the menu list. That’s an odd coincidence!)

   I went back and looked at your website again. It looks so good! Very professional, wonderful colors - very visually engaging - good, easy-to-understand navigation. Congratulations again! Keep going, and come back with any other questions.

9. slafaso says July 28th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
   

   Ron, thanks for all the suggestions and help…I will take a look at the 3d stuff tomorrow. If I look now I know I will never go to bed.

   I am looking forward to the video tutorials…that is a very ambitious project, but I think it will be great for my students to view them.

   Susan