Collecting and converting

Beginning to Present - Lesson 3

Objectives

Make simple changes to selected text, e.g. colour, style and size.
Begin to understand that images, sounds and text can be subject to copyright.
Understand the need for caution when using the Internet to search for images and what to do if they find unsuitable images (See school’s Acceptable Use Policy/AUP).

Lesson Resources

Lesson slides
2Connect

Beginning to Present

Lesson 1 - Planning a non-linear presentation

Lesson 2 - Starting to Research

Lesson 3 - Collecting and Converting

Lesson 4 & 5 - Creating the Presentation

Lesson 6 - Adding animations

Introduction - Adding images

Once they have completed their fact finding, they can begin to look for images to go with their presentation. There is a collection of clipart that comes with 2Create (which they will use for their presentation) but you will probably want to use real images as well. They could even create some of the artwork themselves using 2Paint a picture or other art tools, just ensure that they save their final work as a JPG or PNG image.

Safe image searching

If you are searching for images online, remind the children of a few important eSafety points:

There are lots of very useful things on the internet
But not everything on the internet is nice and not everything is meant for everybody
The internet we get in school is filtered - this means we try to take most of the bad stuff out.
But it’s impossible to always stop everything, so very rarely things might get through.

What should you do if you ever see something on the internet that you don’t like or think you shouldn’t be looking at? Encourage them to stay calm and don’t worry. Turn off the screen but don’t close the page. Tell an adult they trust so they can try to do something about it. (or whatever is accordance with your school acceptable use policy)

Your school internet service should be filtered and there are children’s search engines likes Dinosearch that use Google Safesearch as the default. You may want to use these instead of just Google, but no filtering is perfect and it’s possible rogue images will get through, so search with care, but not fear! Children need to be taught how to do this safely rather than just avoid doing it.

A couple of other points to make when searching for images are:

1. Use images that have been labelled as available for reuse - Someone owns every image on the internet and we shouldn’t take and use other people’s things if they haven’t said it’s okay. In Google image searches, once you have searched for an image, click on Search Tools and Usage Rights then choose Labelled for reuse to see images that people have said it’s okay to use in your work.

There are also several great websites that provide libraries of copyright free images here's some to try:

2. Don’t save thumbnails of images! - The small images we see when we do an image search are called thumbnails, they are mini versions of the real image. If we save and then stretch these they usually go blurry and pixelated, which looks really bad in our work. So always click on the image, then click on view image, then right click and Save Image As... to save the original, full size image, which will be much better quality and look much nicer in our work.

They should save all the images they want to use in their presentation to their Documents folder on the network.

From plan to presentation

Time to convert their plan into the beginnings of their non-linear presentation. Re-open their 2Connect file from last lesson and click on the green arrow in the top right of the screen. Choose ‘Export to 2Create’ and wait for it to load, open it with 2Create when prompted.

Doing this will create all your pages, add the headings and notes they have already put into their plan and create interactive buttons to move between pages (represented by the coloured arrows to show where the buttons take you).

Get the children to save their work once it has been imported into 2Create.

From here it is about turning notes into full sentences and making the pages look great. Double click on any of the page boxes to edit them. This is how it will look if you have added clipart and notes to your boxes when you were using 2Connect:

If you had a lot of notes, they may not all be visible at first. Ensure you have chosen the select tool:

This will let you select, move and resize all the objects on your page. You can click on the text boxes and edit the content. The children may need to work on tidying up or adding to their notes and then making the box big enough so all the text can be seen.

Formatting tools to resize text, change fonts etc will appear at the top of the screen when you click on the text boxes. If you click in a text box and click on a colour it will change the background colour of the text box, if you highlight the text before clicking the colour it will change the text colour.