Building
Learners
Project

I just want to check and find out if we are continuing using this site for another school year?

There are now almost 100 different text and video tutorial files on TR’s new Help site, as well as links to useful TR blog posts.The materials are organized into the following five main groups.

Creating Screens & Projects
Uploading & Organizing Resources
Working with Groups
Using the Calendar
Better Design

An important new addition is the search box. Type in any topic for which you have a question, and a selection of appropriate materials appears to offer you answers.

Under the “Creating Screens & Projects” section, dig into “Get a Good Start.” It contains most of the current videos, but its title may be a bit deceptive. It offers more than just a good start and will introduce you to valuable design strategies, shortcuts, and techniques.

We wanted the layout of the site to have a Google-like simplicity:

You can access the Help site in four ways:

1) Go to www.trintuition.com/help

2) Click on the button in the top left corner of your workBench screen that says “Help Building Projects”

3) Double-click on the “Quick Start Menu” in your Resource list

4) Click on the “Support” button on the TR website.

It would be very helpful to us if you would give us your impressions of using the new site and its materials, so that we can evolve and continue to improve it.

Just wanted to say hi to everyone… I am sure everyone else is recovering from the holidays. I look forward to getting back to work on my many projects. I clicked around earlier and found some new stuff…and i discovered Wordle which is “way too kewl!!!” as my students would say!

Happy 2009 to all

It was the stretch before Christmas,
And all through our blog house
Not a creature was stirring,
Not even a mouse.

Bytes were left hanging in rows of sleepy storage,
As holidays minds turned to hot, tasty porridge.
But back in the cozy Boston workshop,
The TR Elves are all ahop and aflop,
They’re building the new zippy HELP scheme
That will make creating more a Web 2.0 dream.

So, New Year’s projects will tumble and flow,
Out of student head’s like cookie dough.
And we’ll all newly awaken
To share our best pedagogical baking,
And have our blog house rocking and quaking
With our New Year’s Building Learner’s show.

The best holiday delights to you from the TR Elves!

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 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.

I have recently been in touch with other members and am starting to do some projects with them. I am glad I joined this program. I love learning and doing “new” things. Thanks!! Sue

I have just shared a sample Quick Project and project template for a Visual Poem Quick Project. You can find it one of two ways:

1.  I have shared them with all the project members within the workBench (go to Manage My Resources  to see them under Shared With Me and click to Make me a Copy).  Feel free to change the versions I made to better suit your needs with YOUR students (ex. change the requirements, etc.)
2. You can view the sample project itself  from this URL: http://tf.trintuition.com/cshively/visualpoem.  Feel free to share it with students (or not).

Here is the background  and some context for this  Quick Project idea:

• Students can write their own poems and add visual images to go with them, either in groups or individually. If you have studied an important historical event, why not ask your elementary student to create a visual poem about it.
• As your class studies poetry and literary devices (imagery, motifs, etc.), have them create a visual poem with annotations to show their understanding of the poem’s imagery. If you use poems from the public domain, you can include the ENTIRE poem in the project. If  the poems you use are newer and still under copyright, have students select portions of the poem under “Fair Use” of copyrighted material to combine with images in their visual poems. This would be a terrific activity for students to explore the visual imagery and themes within song lyrics as poetry, as well.
• Younger students can use classic poems with more concrete imagery to visually illustrate the metaphors and similes they read.
• With elementary classes, do a whole-class visual poem as a message to send (by emailing the URL) to another class in another part of the world (another Building Learners class?) or to your class parents, summarizing what you have learned about animals, Thanksgiving, family, community, or any curriculum concept. This is a wonderful way of culminating a unit and sharing it proudly.
• Gifted students would respond well to the open-ended challenge of visual poetry at ANY age

Have other ideas? Share them here as comments!

Can I upload and play a PowerPoint presentation on my site?  If yes, can you direct me to the directions or explain how to me?  And, if you can show one, can you show more than one?

I was finally able to get my students signed up, and they had a great time experimenting with how they could create a page! Now we need to get serious, but I think I did not really understand how this will work.

My original plan was this: I set up a site with a blank page for each student, thinking they could each create their own page. But when I shared the site I realized they could not edit my site, and if they put it into their own resources (so they had a copy), they would each be editing a separate copy and everything would not be in one place.

So if I understood what I read in the help, they each need to create their own project, send me the link to it, and I set the links in my project to connect with their work. Is this correct? Or is there a better way to do this? I’d hate to get too far into the process before I find out I’m on the wrong track!

Thanks for any help you can give. It’s taking a while, but I’m still hopeful I’ll get this figured out!
Jane