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| Home>>Unit 4 >> Lesson 1 |
Lesson 1: Making a Lesson |
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| Introduction | |
| Now it is time to put ALL those skills you learned in the other units together. The first thing you need to do is to decide on what topic or subject area you want to create a lesson for. This will depend on your current or future needs in your classroom. | |
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Getting Started |
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| 1. Decide on the topic or subject area you are going to create a stack for. | |
This decision may affect the size of the stack. The default size is 512 X 384, but you can make a stack as large as 640 x 480 or even 1024 x 768.
To give you an idea of how big that is using 640x 480 is most like the size used for Web pages.
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| You may need to do some brainstorming to come up with some ideas. Write down all the topics you are interested in and narrow them down according to interest, availability of information, and time constraints (is there an topic or subject area idea that is most urgently needed?). | |
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2. Research your topic. |
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| Once you have decided upon the type of lesson you are going to create. You need to do some research to gather some information and images for your lesson stack. You can do a Google search (or other search engine) to find some Web sites on your subject area or topic. You may have to do a little searching and putting in various keywords to search for. | |
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For instance, say you want to do a lesson on Mississippi or famous people from Mississippi. Put in the keyword- Famous Mississippians and see what comes up. Check out some of those pages and see if there is any textual information that you could use. More than likely there will also be some good images you can use as well. But be sure that these images are not copyrighted.
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| Searching for Images | |
| If any of the images you want to use are copyrighted, then you can try to contact the owner and request permission. Sometimes these images are for sale, in which case you may have to think if you are willing to spend the money asked for these images. You can alway try to contact the company or owner of these images and ask permission stating the images you are interested in are for educational purposes for your classroom and see if they fall under the "Fair Use" clause. If you are going to put any of the copyrighted images on the Web, they will not fit the definition of Fair Use because they will be open to everyone that can access the Internet unless your Web site being used is only available to your students or the school. If you do find some images that are copyrighted or your are not sure if you can use them, try to find some other images you can use. There are plenty of resources available on the Internet, all you have to do is find them. | |
Once you find some images that would fit into your project, then you can either right-click on the image and click Save As
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| .. or you can use SnagIt to "capture" that image. |  |
| Resources to Use to Gather Materials | |
| A good way to get some images and other information you can use for your project is to use a product called "SnagIt". This software program is from TechSmith . | |
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| TechSmith makes some other cool products as well, such as Camtasia, a video presentation software that is used in this tutorial as well as SnagIt 8.1. Videos made with Camtasia can be put into HyperStudio to enhance the lesson. It is best not to make these videos too long. A HTML page is created so you can always hyperlink to the URL that is created. | |
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| You can also get some softwares "bundled", that is they are offered together for one price. | |
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3. Organizing your Information
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Once you have gathered your information and images you want to use, then you need to organize them. When you create your stack you will need to consider what and how much information will be going on each card and select the card size accordingly. If you have a lot of information and images to include, then you may want a large card size such as 640 X 480 or larger.
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Put your images in an "Images" folder within your project folder. Create a folder with your project name, such as Famous Mississippians. Have that images folder within that folder. (This organization will come in handy especially if you are going to put things on the Web). Put everything that is related to your project in this folder.
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You can separate the information into different folders such as:
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You can also organize all the information for each category together in a folder:
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If you have your information, text, videos, images, and other resources you may want to get content from, you will have a much quicker time putting it together in your stack if you have already done some "leg work" on the research and gathering of the content.
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Creating a Folder |
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In order to have a folders to save your content to, it is useful to have some folders already created, but you can always create a new folder if you see the need.
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To create a folder you need to go to the area you want to save the folder in. For example, you may want to save your project folder in My Documents, on your Desktop, or other location. You may have a folder called My School Work which could be located on your desktop or in My Documents. This will depend upon how you organize the folders on your computer.
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You may decide to put your project folder in My Documents or you can browse for another location. |
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| To save information into your folder you go to File>Save As to specify the location by browsing to the folder. | |
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