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
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