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TeachersFirst Edge entry: for adventurous technology users. This amazing tool allows users to create web pages and full web sites without any special software, using online drag-and-drop tools. The resulting pages are polished and professional far beyond what you would expect from an online tool. The free version allows you to create single pages or full sites, including uploaded files, and save them. Viewers can access them online (via a unique URL you request) or from downloaded files you can easily create. See a sample our editors made here. The sample includes many ideas for ways to use this tool with your students. For better examples of the visual possibilities, look at the gallery of examples trIntuition workBench offers. They are superb! You and your students can access the tool from any online computer that has the necessary version of Flash: both Mac and Windows. A premium level of membership provides the ability to set up groups and collaborate, but it does cost money. The free version is still quite impressive. One distinct advantage of the ability to download a finished product is the fact that OFFline projects using copyrighted materials can still fall under Fair Use, assuming you limit the number of actual copies. You can also avoid any school policy concerns about posting student work online by keeping it within your school or network. To be able to use ALL tools, be sure you have Flash 9 or higher. Get it from the TeachersFirst Toolbox page.. If you are not allowed to install software, fear not. All but a very few tools and all finished products work in Flash 7. If you can see the TeachersFirst "What's New" on our home page, you can use the workBench!
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In the Classroom:
Skills needed: Join the site (free). We recommend that you tour the examples, then start a new project and/or view the tutorials accessible through a question mark in the top left corner. Make sure you spot the ways to SAVE your project, view and use the site map that is generated for you automatically, and obtain both a URL and a downloaded copy of your project. Projects do NOT save automatically!
Safety and logistics issues: all users must set up an account with an email address. One email address is permitted to have multiple user names and passwords associated with it. If your students do not have school email (and most do not), you have three options:
1. Create a single, whole-class account using an "extra" email account of your own. Note that you do not need to be able to access the email from school to get started (no confirmation routine). This works fine for a few projects or a whole-class project.
2. Create multiple username accounts (one for each student or group), all using your "extra" email account as their email. This will send the username/password reminders to your email for record-keeping.
Remember that in the free version, each account is separate , so you cannot "share" images, etc. without uploading them to EACH account.
3. Create your own Gmail account with up to 20 subaccounts for each group of students (by code name or number) within your classes. Here is a blog post that tells how to set up GMail subaccounts to use for any online membership service. If you teach multiple sections, use numbers and have each class period use the same set of numbers. There are "sabotage" risks. See the second page of our editor's trIntuition example for solutions to that. Such Gmail subaccounts will come in handy for just about any web 2.0 tool you use in class, so the effort is worth it. Just keep a record of WHO is using which account!
Possible uses for trIntuition workBench? Portfolios; college application "visual essays;" digital biodiversity logs (with digital pictures students take); online literary magazines; personal reflections in images and text; research project presentations; comparisons of online content, such as political candidates' sites or content sites used in research (compared for bias); science sites documenting experiments or illustrating concepts, such as the water cycle; "Visual" lab reports; Digital scrapbooks using images from the public domain and video and audio clips from a time in history -- such as the Roaring Twenties; Local history interactive stories; Visual interpretations of major concepts, such as a "visual" U.S. Constitution. Imagine building your own online library of raw materials for your students to create their own "webscreens" as a new way of assessing understanding: you provide the digital pictures, and they sequence, caption, and write about them (younger students) or you provide the steps in a project as a template, and they insert the actual content of their own. After a first project where you provide "building blocks," the sky is the limit on what they can do. Even the very young can make suggestions as you "create" a whole-class product together using an interactive whiteboard. Consider making a new project for each unit you teach so students can "recap" long after the unit ends. |
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