Making a Layered Text With 2 Create

In my last post I mentioned using 2 create to develop homemade layered texts, that work in a similar way to those developed by the Hamilton Trust. With a Year 4 class I originally used Powerpoint to do this, while working on our theme around the Romans in Britain. As a class we developed a paired collaborative writing project based on the life of a slave boy called Victor and used this to frame a "really long historical story."

We used available non fiction texts and Scheme materials including secondary and primary source material to support the information gathering process, and began exploring through the use of images, talk for writing and role play, how it might have been to be a slave of Victor's age. From the information we had available, comparing this with our own lives as we tried to develop empathy with our central character. The text presented in the flash presentation below was developed over the course of our writing unit, during guided and modelled composition activities. It was originally part of a PowerPoint story, including hyperlinks to lead us off to the stop and think areas, that were developed, we hoped, to engage our readers with the story in a different way. Adding depth to the engagement our readers would have, by asking them to explore aspects of the story we had written more deeply, and doing things in response to our writing.



Using 2Create to Add a New Dimension to an Existing Idea

This morning I have been playing with 2create, by 2 simple, and as I mentioned in my previous post, this tool has the ability to export, what is in this case a mirror of the powerpoint show we originally created as a class, in a flash format. To create the basis of this presentation, I opened 2 create and inserting the same number of slides as I had in the original PowerPoint show. Toggling between PowerPoint and 2Create I copied the content of each slide from PowerPoint to its corresponding slide in 2Create.



Bringing the Show To Life

Adding Common Navigation Structures to the Show

With the content in place, I then added a series of common buttons for navigation.

• A back button - to take us to the previous slide
• A next button - to take us to the next slide in the story
• A home button - the house, to return us to the first slide in the show
• A thought bubble button - to take us to one of the stop and think or explore pages.

For ease of development, I made one full set of buttons opn the first page, and then selected, copied and pasted these to each of the slides in my 2create presentation.

It is important to emphasise to students why common navigation structures are neccesary in texts such as this which have strong parallels and models in the web sites we visit. The navigation structures help our readers understand how the text we have and are creating is intended to work. Readers need this in order to help them engage with our work in the way we intended. Good Authors of course take their readers into account when they are writing. Not all student shows need to have the same navigation tools or symbols, but within each show or text the navigation style should be consistent.

Linking the Pages in the show

With the navigation buttons in place, hyperlinks can be added between slides, allowing readers to turn or move from one page to another. In 2create this is done, by

• Clicking on the button or object we want to use as our link
• Right clicking to reveal a context menu for that object.
• Clicking the actions tool,
• In the "actions" dialogue box. Clicking the "turn page" tab,
• Selecting from the drop down menu the page we want to link to, before pressing the ok button.

When working with the students on our mapping project they were required to give each page or slide a name, so they could see at a glance where their buttons were leading to. You may find this process useful too if you decide to play with this tool. This process was repeated with each button throughout the show, with buttons not required on certain slides being deleted as I went.

Testing the Show

This may seem obvious but when building or compiling anything with Hyperlinks in I always try them out locally or through preview, to make sure they lead to where I want before I publish. Pressing the green play button in 2 create, compiles a flash file to run in the program, so the look, feel and navigation of the project can be trialled and evaluated before being published. Working on our mapping project the students have been encouraged to engage with this process continuously as their atlases were being developed, it has a kind of a DT feel to it, but in projects such as this we are not just learning ICT skills we are creating content and authoring textual spaces that we want our readers to engage with. There is nothing more frustrating than engaging with an online text and then hitting a dead link. It is advisable therefore to spend time working through the text you have created or encouraging the students to spend time playing in their own texts before publication.

Publishing the Show

Using 2create, the slide show can be saved in the software's native format (.2cr), but also exported as a "Flash File." (.swf). Flash Files, are a web standard format, many of the websites we visit everyday use flash, BBC Bitesize interactivities are flash files, and the navigation panel in "Espresso" for example is flash based. Flash files can be added to the school website, and as you can see here to a blog so visitors can engage interactively with the work we or our students have developed through 2create. In order to have the file run, it must be uploaded to a web host in the first instance, this file has been uploaded to the file storage space on my web site and then linked to the blog through a piece of code I borrowed from "Flash For Blogger -Dummies Guide."

The SmartBoard's Notebook, is also enabled to allow the inclusion and use of flash based interactivities. So the files developed in 2create can become additional multimodal resources for use on the IWB.

Slideshow Credits: Original Story by SMills and Y4 (2004) Teyfant Community School, Redeveloped by SMills in 2create 2008

Active Mapping and 2Create: An Example Outcome

I've posted a number of times in the past about 2 simple's 2 create a story, and how I have used "export as flash," to create web publishable interactive texts with students. 2 create has been the tool of choice this term, and it too has an "export" or "save as flash" file option. The big difference between the two tools as you will see from the example below, a sneak peak from our mapping project is the ability to develop your own navigation paths, by inserting buttons and hyperlinks.

By exporting as flash the 2 create project is also useable as a portable/standalone presentation, that can be run not only in web pages like the one below, but can also be inserted and played in a Smartboard Notebook, as part of a presentation. So as part of a teacher resource development tool box it is also apotentially powerful tool, that could be used to develop layered texts, similar to those developed for the National Literacy Strategy's IWB Packages using PowerPoint, and the flash based multimodal stories presented by the Hamilton Trust.

The flash file below, exported from 2 create has been uploaded to our school server, using the portable apps version of Filezilla I downloaded last weekend, and then embedded here using a piece of code I found on Flash For Blogger-dummies Guide.




Now I know that this works, I can spend some time with the students next week using this tool to show how their completed files get onto the web on the IWB, before using the embed flash tool with small groups on our class wordpress blog to share their maps as they are finished. A big well done to T and P, who developed this file. What I was particularly impressed about with this example, is how the two students themselves decided to label the buttons. This they said was to help their visitors understand how the map worked and where they would go on their journey. I hope this illustrates the kind of learning outcomes that were achieved and presented in my previous post. Top job Year 3.

Image and File Credits: Maps. worldatlas.com Photographs and Slide Show: Y3 Teyfant Community School

Active Mapping and 2Create

This term my students have been working on a Geography Theme around their local area, that lead as an aside to a number of post on using Quikmaps. My curiosity about how to tag images in this environment emerged from work I was doing with the class anyway, using digital images to map our locality, firstly on paper and alongside this using 2 create by 2 simple to develop a simple zoomable atlas.

The project began as a means of supporting understanding of their place in the world. Our starting point was on the amazing worldatlas.com website, where students were encouraged to explore the site by gradually zooming into the UK, saving copies of maps from their journey through the website as they went. These images were saved locally to their home drives for use as the project developed, and included

• A World Map
• A Map of Europe
• A Map of the UK
• A Map of England
• and A Map of Bristol

The final map they needed for the project, showing the school and our environs was a Quickmap, that I developed for and with them, showing the route of a walk we took around school, to which I tagged, photographs taken by the students on their walk, for display on the school website, and use in a small video project about our favourite places.

With these images stored, the students used 2 create to make an initial 6 slide show, and on each slide they placed the the maps in "zoom order." The next stage was to use buttons to locate the zoom point for the map, a button being placed on Our home continent, The UK, England, Bristol and so on.


Right clicking on the buttons, actions were added that hyperlinked each location to the map associated with it, so clicking on the Europe button would take us to a slide with a map of Europe on it, Clicking the UK button there would take us to a map of the UK and so on, until we eventually arrived in Bristol. On the Bristol map a button was added to take us to another slide yet to be created where the aerial photo developed in Quikmaps would be located.

Getting the aerial photo we had made in Quikmaps was achieved by making a screen print. With the Quikmap in the web browser window, the print screen key was pressed, then in a graphics package, this image was pasted and cropped, before being saved to a shared folder for the students to use in their projects.

For the next stage of the project all of the photographs taken by the students on our walk, and during subsequent activities about our favourite places in school were copied to a shared folder alongside the quikmap as a shared resource for the remainder of the project. The students then inserted the quikmap image to their 6th slide. In their groups they decided which of the images they would like to use in their project and added additional slides to accommodate them.

With the Quikmap inserted, and their chosen photographs added to the additional slides, they then set about linking each photograph to its location, inserting multiple buttons to the quikmap, using place holder pins as reference points that enabled them to think about where each location was in relation to the others. On the photoslides adding backlinks the map enabled the document to become a kind of virtual tour too, as the reader is directed to return to look at other locations they have photographed.

The whole process has been incredibly exciting. The use of talk throughout, has facilitated through discussion the use of subject specific vocabulary in context, we have used maps to begin engaging with the scalability of the world from landmass and ocean, to continent, country city or town and region. Within our locality we have used maps to find and estimate position of place in relation to others, as well as to help observe features of our place in space. As an active mapping project the children have not only experienced a diverse and challenging set of ICT skills, but they have used these practically to consolidate geographical concepts moving from a global position to hands on mapping of their own locality. I will hope to share some of these projects, by exporting the projects to Flash, and embedding these for exploration on the school website soon, alongside the video project which is emerging using photographs to talk about our favourite places.

Geotagging a Learning Journey

On Wednesday afternoon we went for a walk around the school environment with the aim of exploring and capturing digitally features of the existing and currently changing landscape around the site. In previous posts, I have mentioned other projects involving creative partnerships, where students are logging these changes over time by digital means, as the new all through school rises in the space behind our current school building. During discussion with my class the other day, it slowly became apparent just how few of the students had actually noticed some of the more prominent features of the locality they pass everyday. It struck me as interesting how easy it is to assume and take for granted the knowledge and experiences our young cares bring to school of their locality and their place in it.

A couple of questions I have always found interesting to ask students when looking at a landscape painting are "where they think the artist was when they made the image?" and "what do they think might have been behind them, to the left, the right or above the canvas?" I pondered the other day how much I enjoyed sitting on the top deck of a bus, with the chance to see familiar settings from a different perspective, and from this came the idea for a digital landscape walk, using digital photographs to enable students to capture different views from the same location, that we could then use to focus discussion back in the classroom in relation to a map of the journey.



This map created using quikmaps, shows an aerial photograph of the route we followed with the students. Each of the small map pins, showing a staging point on the journey. The students used digital blue cameras at each staging point to capture two images, one looking out from the school into the surrounding landscape, and another after a 180 degree turn that captured the scene looking back towards the school grounds. Back in class the students were encouraged to review their images, identifying and locating on a shared map where each image had been captured, before matching the two opposing landscape perspectives, to locations on the map. To follow up, and as a table top activity, small groups of students were given copies of a blank map and challenged to mark the route they had followed, locate the staging points for themselves before finally mapping their images to their locations.

The students are currently using 2 Simple's 2create, to to develop their own interactive atlases. These are very much in the developmental stage. We have used maps downloaded from World Atlas.com, to create slides that begin with the world and which will progressively zoom down onto the place where we live and work, using hyperlinked buttons to enable this. I am now thinking how interesting it would be to extend the project, by encouraging the students to think about how this tool could be used to to create a textured presentation about our school in its landscape, maybe in a virtual tour type format. Using 2Create, means that the final projects can be exported in flash format for publication to the web, or on the year group blog, providing audience and purpose for the outcomes.

Post Script:

YAY! Thanks to Tom Barrett and Twitter I have now also learned how to add some of the images that the students captured to our quikmap. This is really exciting...

Experimenting With Blogger and 2 Create a Story

I uploaded my students Henry VIII Biographies yesterday to the school website, and began thinking how great it would be to be able to embed an example or two here to share. The flash files were hosted already so there had to be a way of embedding them. Having played around for a bit, I have managed to meet my aim. Having borrowed some code from the Dummies Guide to Google Blogger Beta and "flash for blogger" following a bit of a fiddle, here are the results.





Now I am really excited about the further possibilities, this opens up for using 2create and 2 Create a Story. 2Create and 2Create a Story, both export to flash, can include embedded sound effects and animation, so with space to upload and host these files, inclusion to a blog space offers a new set of multimodal text publication possibilities. Am now pondering how we might do the same thing with the student's Wordpress blogs. Watch this space.

Post Script

After a visit to our y3 blog hosted by Ethink I have used the embed flash plugin to add one of the flash files created in 2 create a story to the blog. Can't wait to share this next term.

Soundsnap and Jing

I have been a bit busy lately, but have been determined to grab some me time this weekend. Some space to blob out, get on blog and play with some of the tools I have been pointed to through shared links on del.icio.us. Thanks to John Sutton, for pointing out these two resources.

Soundsnap, A collection of free to use sound effects recorded by members of the Soundsnap community. These are suggested for use in podcast making, but could also be used in other Multimedia projects or Multimodal Authoring Activities, including animation or film making projects, PowerPoints, 2create and 2 create a story projects and PhotoStories.

Jing: In John's words, a "Great free screen recorder that records what you are doing on your pc. Has an instant share facility to embed in your blog, post a link in an instant messenger service." Will have a play with this one later, as looks really useful. There is also a version for the Mac. Check out this post on John's Blog called Sketchcasting is the New Podcasting?

Making a Start With Web Design and Development

Over the course of the year, many of the students in upper Key Stage 2 have been working with a host of web based, enabled or modelling resources and tools. Think.com has been used as a learning community tool, PowerPoint has been used to model the principles of hyperlinking and how web like resources work and can be developed offline. They have begun to develop blogs as a class, and engaged with online resources and with think to lay the foundations for understanding what it means to be safe online. This term and last we began working with year 5 on a pilot project with Fronter, the LAs proposed learning platform, and decided that this should be framed by a unit of work I wrote a number of years ago that was adopted and adapted to become part of the LAs scheme of work for ICT.

The unit was originally developed with a year 4 class, as a challenge to help me redesign the school's website. It began as all design and technology units do with evaluation and disassembly activities. We visited a range of websites already available on the web, and created by or for schools. We explored the websites identifying features we liked or disliked, narrowing down gradually those that we might like our website to include. From here on paper we designed a navigation bar, including genreal areas we would like to appear on our site. Having established our website zones, the children worked in small groups on particular aspects of the site, collecting photographs, interviewing people, and using MS Word and MS Publisher to create pages, which were eventually saved as html, and linked into a frame set I had developed from their ideas in FrontPage. The project was so successful that I and Keith Ansell our ICT curriculum Support Teacher extended the project with other local primary schools, as part of an ICT project for the Success@ action zone.

This term however I have begun using 2 Create,(2 create a story's sibling) as a framing tool to engage year 5 students with the process. We began as above, by visiting other school sites, and then returning to our own existing structure. Using their community pages as a starting point I introduced the idea of how some aspects of the site were becoming reduntant, or were perhaps repeating other tools we were using. I asked them in their navigation bar design process to consider how we might change or reorganise the community pages, removing links we were not using, or perhaps adding new sections that were not there in their place. What would they like to have on their website. Instead of using a paper based tool, I opted to use 2 create to enable them to visually develop, hands on, their own version of the site.

They began by starting a new project and inserting the first page, using this to install their navigation structure to. They used clipart as icons and buttons as well as text to do this. They had noticed how the navigation bar and banner section on the opening page of their community pages always remained the same, and in subsequent sessions I have been able to introduce how this is made possible. Our community pages are developed within frame sets. Although seeming to be one page, it is actually made up of three, when a hyperlink is clicked, only the page to the lower right is loaded the others remain in place. To enable this to happen on a single page layout like the one they are using in 2 create, the key is for the visual appearence of the page to remain the same, while only the content changes. Sometimes it is great being an old dog who can teach the newbies some tricks. How to make a 2 create page appear that it is a frame set. With the navigation icons and text in place, we have added coloured boxes to the left hand side of the page, and another along the top to look like the banner. We selected both of these rectangles and used the order tool to send them to the back. At this stage we still only had one page in our site, so looking at the number of icons we had in our navigation bar, which in most cases was 5, we inserted new pages. opening our first page in the viewer, we selected all objects by dragging around the slide, copied them to the clipboard, and then opened each of the remaining pages individually, and pasted these in place, so we had 5 identical slides, on which to present the content identified in our navigation bar. I know I could have skipped the copy and paste process by simply asking the software to insert duplicates, but I wanted the students to develop the select all and copy skill. I tools such as frontpage this would not be achieved efficiently by copy and paste either, but by saving each file as and renaming them.

The students then began linking the pages to each other, and inserting back links. To the lower right of each page, they now have a large clear space, and it is here they will place their page content, and when the link buttons are pressed, and a page arrives what they see appears to be like the frame set in the real school community pages, the buttons will appear in exactly the same place, as will the banner. The students are really enjoying this task, it builds nicely on their prior experiences with PowerPoint and Think, but here they have complete control over the objects and pages they are creating.

In addition what has been said above, what I think is really powerful about 2 create and the students will probably not fully appreciate this until the project is complete, is a built in tool it shares with 2 create a story and how the final project outcomes can be saved as Flash Files. Flash an industry and web standard tool, generates special movie files from projects developed, that can be embedded in to html or web pages enabling them to run as navigable files. These 2 create projects when saved as Flash Files will function in a similar way, with every small web project file the students have created running as if standalone websites within a single page on the school website. The children will be able to see and share their website projects live with each other, their teachers and their parents.

The structures they have identified will be used to develop the navigation and page structure for their VLE Space, somewhere we would like them to work next year. I will also be drawing on their ideas to refine the student community sections of the school website. By working on this project the outcomes they develop will influence a real web project.