Introduction

These two lessons look at making the transition from using 2Publish to other, more 'grown up' publishing tools such as Microsoft Publisher. It is likely that they will take at least two weeks for the children to complete their publication, depending on what specific task you set them, however, the planning is written as one long plan as it is difficult to say where lesson breaks would come with such an open ended task.

The screenshots in this plan are from Publisher 2010 so depending on which version of Publisher you have, some features may be in a different place on the screen. In earlier versions of Publisher tools could also be found down the left hand side of the screen. If you do not have access to Publisher, you can achieve very similar results with Microsoft Powerpoint or Google Slides. 

Recap the last few lessons and the different types of publications that the children have created. What skills have you learned so far? What does formatting mean? What is a font? Why might I want to change a font? 

 

Publisher

Explain that this week we are going to be using a different, more ‘grown up’ bit of software called Publisher to replicate the work we did last week. We are also going to compare Publisher and 2Publish. Open up Publisher.

 

 

On the first screen you will be presented with all the publishing templates, very much like you are in 2Publish+, what options can the children see? 

Remind them of last week’s lesson where they started with a blank page and added their own elements with 2Publish+  Can they see a blank page option here? Point out that there are landscape and portrait options and open one of them.

 

 

Ensure you are on the ‘Home’ tab on the menu ribbon, have a look at the buttons and options at the top of the screen, ask them to talk to a partner and discuss what they can see, what do they recognise from 2Simple? What looks similar? What don’t they recognise?

Explain that there are a lot more tools in Publisher than in 2Publish+ but they are just going to be using some of the more simple tools to begin with.

 

 

Adding text

Together find the buttons to add a text box and add one to the page.

 

 

Demonstrate how you need to drag it out to the required size on the page, and then once it’s on the page you can adjust it with the white circular handles or rotate it with the green handle. 

 

 

Ask the children to add a text box to their page for their title. Add their title and see if they can format the text by making it bigger, choosing a font and colour.

 

 

Adding a border

Next add a border to your page by going to shapes and choosing the rectangle, drag it to fit the blue print border on the page. Point out to the children that they should keep all their work inside this blue box and that it won’t show up on their final work.

When you’ve added a rectangle you will notice extra tabs appear with more formatting options. Some features are repeated from the Home tab, but other useful things appear in the ‘Drawing tools’ tab. Show the children how to format the box or add shape styles to your border.

 

 

You may need to show them how to send their border backwards if they choose to fill it or apply a shape style with a fill effect as it may cover their title.

 

 

 

Save your work at this point (File > Save as). 

Once they’ve added their title and their border ask them to add some text boxes for their information. They can then format their text as well. Remind them about typing with two hands and not to worry too much about perfect spelling at this point (we’ll use the spell checker later!). 

 

 

Adding images

Next add their images (you may want to save a selection ready for them on the shared area).

 

 

The images may appear very large when they appear on the page, depending on size of the original image. Remind them how to adjust the size of the image by always using the corner handles so the image does not get skewed or squashed.

 

 

You can easily add frames and shadows to your images with the Picture styles that appear in the format tab.

 

 

 

Check your work

When their publication is complete, it’s time to check their work. They may have noticed red wiggly lines under some words in their work (mistakes added to the screenshot below)

 

 

Tell them that the computer does not recognise these words. They may be spelled incorrectly or they may just be words that the computer does not know, like some names, so we need to check them very carefully. 

 

Go to the review tab and show them the spell checker tool.

 

 

It will start to check their document, when it finds a word it does not recognise it may suggest an alternative. This is where we need to be careful. It cannot spell on it’s own, it just checks words against it’s built-in dictionary, so we need to check the suggestion and decide if we need to change our word, if so, click change. Repeat this for any other words it finds.

 

 

Remind them it is also important to read it through yourself as the computer can sometimes miss words that are incorrect, such as homophones. Discuss what might happen if your work contained some of these words:

• see, sea
• there, their, they’re
• by, buy, bye

 

Save your work

When checked and complete, save your work for the final time and decide what you are going to do with their work. If you just want to print it, keeping it in Publisher format should be fine. If you want to publish it online on your website or blog, you may wish to change the file type to a PDF or PNG image file.

 

 

 

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Other great publishing tools

Comic Life

Comic Life is a brilliant tool designed specifically for making... you guessed it! Comic Strips. It is now in its third PC and Mac version and there is also an excellent iPad app. 

You can easily add images and text and stylize every element of your comic to your heart’s content, making very professional looking comic strips with minimal effort. The iPad app in particular is very good value costing just £2.99, and easy to combine with your iPad camera or other drawing apps for creating images.

 

Book Creator

Another wonderful iPad app, Book Creator makes it really easy to build your own multimedia publications. 

Add images, video clips, sound and text and style them all to produce wonderful iBooks. It’s very easy to pick up and use and usable at different levels right through the Primary age range. It’s a great tool for combining work made in lots of different apps, such as images you’ve drawn, animations you’ve created, song you’ve composed, and photos or videos you’ve taken.

There’s a free version that lets you try out the app but it only lets you make one book. The paid version (again just £2.99) lets you make as many as you like. 

 

Google Docs / Drawings

If your students have been set up with a Google accounts, they have access to Google Drive with Google Docs, Drawings and other tools. Drive offers an office suite very similar to Microsoft Office with the added feature of sharing and online collaboration on the same document at the same time between users, as well as many great and very powerful features. Docs is a word processor, very much like Word, and Drawings is a publishing tool that allows a more flexible page layout, more like Publisher.

Perhaps something your students will be more ready for in KS2 due to the logins needed, but it’s a wonderful set of tools that can transform the way you work on documents and presentations.