Building
Learners
Project

I am back for more help. I am taking part in a collaborative project called How Tall is a First Grader? I made a chart in excel showing the results in my school. I took a picture of my screen and tried to put it on a blank screen in my site. But it opens with a launch screen. Is there another format I can save my file in so it is easily viewed by the children?

Sue

The folks at TRintuition and TeachersFirst have been talking about this project and the fact that many teachers and students are just getting their feet wet (while some are still scanning the waters from the hill above). We have therefore decided to EXTEND the Building Learners Project timeline through the end of the 2008-2009 school year (until your school ends in May/June).

 Our hopes in extending the project:

• More students and teachers will be able to produce more projects- or decide to get started!
• Students will become more familiar with all the tools and possibilities, producing more sophisticated or better projects after the “bells and whistles” phase passes by
• Teachers will discover more of the tools to manage groups
• Classes may be able to collaborate on a project with another school (post on the blog if you seek such a contact)
• The project can document the best ways to support teachers in this three-way collaboration of teachers/web tool/teacher resource site
• This documentation can lead to a “model” that we can share with others at conferences, etc. And we might ask you to join us in presenting (teachers and/or students!).

TeachersFirst’s promise to you:

We will award prizes to the most effective projects completed by students (and teachers) involved in the Building Learners Project. Bells and whistles are not nearly as important as evidence of learning. The name of the project is, after all, Building LEARNERS. Keep the prize possibility in mind, but know that learning is the best prize of all.

If you have a teacher-colleague who is not involved with BLP but would like to join you in the project, email me. We have room to add some others. Perhaps there is a classroom down the hall or across the community from you with a teacher-friend you would like to invite to collaborate. Just let me know: cshively(at)sflinc.org

The problems in Firefox with bringing in remote images got us investigating. We haven’t been able to replicate the problem but have a few additional suggestions that might help.

When you get the results of an advanced search for Creative Commons images in Flickr, you’re shown a page (or pages) with large thumbnails of pictures on the left. If you right-click over one of the thumbnails and go to “properties,” there are two web addresses given, one for the link that the picture contains and one for the image itself, and it is easy to mix them up. Best to  follow Candace’s direction. Click on the thumbnail, and it will take you to a larger version of the picture on a new page.  It’s really valuable to get the bigger picture with its higher quality rather than the largish thumbnail anyway, so go for big! Be sure to copy the entire address. You may have to make the “Properties” box a little bigger to easily copy it all.

When you click on “Properties” for the large version of the picture, only one web address is given, and that’s named “Location.”  That’s what you want to copy and paste.

If you are moving through this whole process in Safari on a Mac, right-clicking (control-clicking)  over a picture brings up a menu that doesn’t contain “Properties.” Click on “Open image in new window.” If you isolate the picture so that it is the only thing in the window, the web address you need to copy is in the address bar for that window. Copy and paste that, and the image will open remotely in the workBench screen.

An important additional note, if you are as much of a fan of the Eyedropper in the Color Chooser as I am. After you bring a remote image into a project, you can’t use the Eyedropper again in that project. It’s not a bug. Flash has built-in, complicated security features that are triggered in the presence of remotely loaded content. Those features block the Eyedropper code. We haven’t found a way to work around that security block, so that the Eyedropper can continue to function with remote images.

However, there is a good alternative to the Eyedropper in these cases. We just revised the Color Chooser palettes, which are collections of five colors that are fed into the Color Chooser from the colourlovers.com website. You can now even pick a color that you like and find matching pallets that artists and graphic designers have created. We have a new post up about the palettes, where you can experiment with these new features:

http://blog.trintuition.com/?p=146

Of course you can experiment as well with the Color Chooser when you open your own workBench.

Just a quick note on additional accessible and usable images. In addition to shapes, repeating patterns, shadows, several buttons, picture frames, and one falling-leaf animation, the workBench Library has between 50 - 60 images that you can use in any project. They’re grouped into three categories: Nature, People and Places, and Abstract. Double-click on the icon for any image to preview it.

If you haven’t made your way to the workBench Library yet, take a quick look at this tutorial page:

http://www.trintuition.com/tutorial/wkbchlib

I was so excited to try out Candace’s Visual Poem template. I signed up at Flicker and found all the photos I wanted. Then feeling all excited I uploaded them and not a single one was visible. Frustrated, I kept trying and sudden I had a brain flash. Once before I wasn’t able to do something on my site and it turned out it was because I was using Firefox. As soon as I uploaded the pictures using Internet Explorer it worked fine.

Hope I can save someone else’s frustration

Enjoy, Sue