Let’s use a wonderful review of the workBench and the site that’s hosting it as a springboard to investigate one of the Internet’s great challenges for teachers. First, however, a visit to the wacky, and occasionally dark, side.

It’s not likely that there is a piece of nuttiness adrift in humankind that isn’t supported with conviction and “evidence” somewhere on the Internet.

We did a Google search for “the world is flat, believers” and discovered the Flat Earth Society, which has as its mission “deprogramming” our misconceptions about living on a sphere. The Internet tells us that, in addition to the world being flat, the Holocaust never happened, nor did the Apollo 11 landing on the moon. Our government orchestrated 9/11, and poor Charlemagne, he didn’t exist. As a matter of fact, the entire Middle Ages didn’t happen.

Yikes. Life was easier when the teacher, textbook, and library gave you the story already hewn, and all you had to do was memorize it for the test. A student could thrive back then, unencumbered by an original or critical thought, in an educational world that didn’t put much stock in independent thinking.

There’s been a dramatic shift. With so much unvetted information swirling about today, digital and otherwise, and with such large dollops of misinformation craftily scooped into our political discourse, the challenge is to get students to decipher the wacky from the wise independently.

It’s more important today to be able to vet and validate ideas from within the methodology of a discipline than it is to know mountains of its stuff.

This challenge in information sorting and weighing brings us back to that fine review of the workBench that we found in “Tools for Teachers” in the website for the National History Education Clearinghouse.

After reading about the workBench, we naturally asked ourselves, Who are these guys? That’s a good, teachable response to any Internet information. How credible is this site? Does it come from verifiable rocket scientists or from a bunch of wackos wearing beanies with propellers on top?

The initial answer to our question was at the very bottom of the review page in small print. There we found the site’s parentage: The National History Education Clearing House was created by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the Stanford University History Education Group, with funding from the U.S. Department of Education.

Every link above takes you to a .edu web address. Just as a web address beginning with https:// suggests security for e-commerce transactions, .edu suggests a degree of security in terms of intellectual rigor and integrity.

Let’s carry this one step further. Assume that an Astrological University of Transcendental Levitation might have somehow hornswoggled a .edu address, when it only really existed in a server in a dark basement in Des Moines. In addition to their .edu university status, George Mason and Stanford have national reputations and ring very substantial recognition bells.

Finally, getting funding from the U.S. Department of Education is intensely competitive. Applicants are carefully screened and often go through some form of peer review. All these credibility points add up to the who-these-guys-are needle aiming toward rocket scientists.

From our workBench review page, we began browsing the site and found a treasure trove of valuable information and links. Here’s a sampling:

History Content: website reviews, online history lectures, historic sites and museums, gateway to history content, ask-a-historian, links to national centers, and research tools

Best Practices: state-of-the-art practices and multimedia examples of classroom teaching using primary sources, historical thinking, and teaching with textbooks

Teaching Materials: lesson plan reviews, searchable database of state standards, primary source guides, and a gateway to history lesson plans

Under Best Practices, and “Examples of Historical Thinking,” we found a video of Professor Williamson thinking aloud about a “statement by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) regarding the 1925 Scopes Trial.” We were delighted to find that in her “sourcing” this historical document before reading it, she was asking questions similar to ours: who are these guys? Where are they coming from? Why are they writing this?

Follow the links back to the site where Professor Williamson’s video is based, and you’ll find yourself in the Inquiry section of the Historical Thinking Matters website - another rich vein to mine. Right below Professor Williamson’s video is an audio clip entitled “Using the Think Aloud.” It explains Professor Williamson’s thought process and why it is integral to the historical analysis of any primary source material.

Think Alouds seem like such powerful tools for influencing how students formulate questions and solve problems. This whole issue of molding thought processes seems so important that it took us back to the NHEC’s other Examples of Historical Thinking.

There are powerful and transformative ideas here - and not just for historians and history teachers.

Dig in.

(Two brief corrections: not everyone wearing a beanie with a propeller is a wacko, and the value of .edu might be a bit wobbly for hogwarts.edu, Harry Potter’s alma mater, where good intentions can’t overcome the fact that all downloading is via owl.)

We discovered Wordle, an application that opens in your browser windows and lets you create word clouds. Eureka! A word cloud can make a great workBench menu. They are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License that allows for a broad range of such uses.

We went to the Wordle website (www.wordle.net), clicked on create in the menu, typed in the names of some web resources, and clicked on go. This is what we initially got.

After Wordle created our word cloud, we began experimenting with the tools that allow the user to modify fonts, layout, and color. There are 34 different fonts, some quite exotic. The layout options primarily involve vertical, horizontal, or random orientation of the words. There is also an option to have the words appear in alphabetical order from left to right. Finally there are color pallets and range of colors to choose from.

The FAQs explain as well that you can change the size of a word in the word cloud by increasing the number of times you enter it in the text input box. The word will only appear once, but writing it more than once will increase its size.

Here’s our second try.

Wordle is a Java applet that opens in your browser and creates the word cloud on your computer. You can print it, but you can’t save it to your desktop. This is the only tricky part. You need to take a screenshot of it. Before we get into those details, here’s our boldly colored third try that we decided on using.

Back to that screenshot challenge. In the Wordle screen, click on “Open in Window,” and your word cloud will open in its own window. Expand the window to increase the size of the word cloud before taking the screen shot of it.

On a Mac, it’s an easy process. Hold down the SHIFT/COMMAND/and NUMBER 4 keys. The cursor changes. Drag a box around the portion of the screen that you want to grab, release the drag, and a picture of that portion of the screen appears on your desktop. With a PC, you may want to use third-party software, such as Snagit.

If it is not a JPG or PNG file, convert your picture into a JPG. Then upload it to your workBench account. When you drag it into the Canvas, don’t click on “Set as Background.” Most of the word clouds are not the 4:3 proportions of a computer screen. Position the image the way you want it and then make any remaining white background the same color as the word cloud’s background. Next drag in boxes and position them to cover all of the words.

Then link each box to the web address for the resource underneath it and drop the box’s Visibility and Border Sliders to 0, making the boxes into invisible links.

One very important note before we look at our actual menu with its functional links. The FAQ’s on Worldle state that “WORDLE, AS IT STANDS, IS INAPPROPRIATE FOR CLASSROOM USE.” The site doesn’t filter the language used in word clouds, so there are examples in the online gallery that contain profanity.

What you create using Wordle on your own computer is not saved to the site’s gallery unless you explicitly add your work to the Wordle server. It’s a shame they don’t have a filtered version for young students. They’d love playing with word clouds.

Here’s our workBench Wordle menu. Try it out! If you’d like a bigger version, click on the “+” button in the top left corner to open the project in it’s own window.

Also, if you’d like to link to the project, its address is http://www.trintuition.com/resources/wordle

Along with the good people at TeachersFirst (our partners on this project), we have decided to extend the BLP through the end of the school year.

So what does this mean?

It means that you have more time to work with your students to build rich projects and communicate with other classes taking part.

It also means that you still have time to join. It’s a great way to try out all of the workBench’s premium features with your students for free. Interested in getting involved? Shoot an email over to our friend Candace ( cshively [at] sflinc.org ).

Please check out the Building Learners Project Blog to learn more.

Above you’ll find the 2nd episode of our “How’d You Make That” Series. I get a little bit into the concept of negative space, touch on utilizing the workBench Library, and copy and paste entire screens while producing a nice, little website that promotes our (fictional) school’s Arbor Day Assembly. The video stars a lovable baby tree that could turn the biggest paper consumer into a tree hugger.

Hope you Enjoy.

Ron has been asking me for a while to share some of my design secrets.

“No, but they’re mine,” I protested. “Why should I share?”

“For the good of aethetes the world over,” he replied.

And thus the discussion reached its terminus.

So here’s the first installment of what I hope to be a fairly regular vlog that will touch upon design principles, tips, underused or creatively used workBench features, and if I’m feeling nice maybe I’ll even throw in some ice cream.

How could you say no to ice cream?

Two recently-created videos add important information to the tutorial help on building workBench screens and projects. What’s new is the information on copying and pasting in connection with building screens and projects.

The first video focuses on copying and pasting any screen element into other screens. It is possible to take any element, an image, text, menu, design feature, even a color, copy it, and paste it into other screens in the same project or into any other projects that you’re working on.

Pasted elements are in the exact same location as the original, so a menu or title pasted into a series of screens doesn’t appear to move, or jump about, as one moves through the series of screens.

Here’s the first video on adding screens and copying and pasting element.

The second video takes copying and pasting one step further. It’s possible to copy and paste entire screens, either repeatedly into the same project or into other projects. Create the basic design of a portfolio screen that you like, and you can immediately copy and paste it as many times as you like. Add the variable content, and a portfolio of 5, 10, 30, or more screens can be produced with remarkable speed.

This ability to copy and paste screens means that any screen, partially-created or complete, can be used as a template. If you are working with younger students, they don’t have to create screens from scratch but can work with a screen that’s is almost complete. They might only add a response that’s a block of text in a text box.

Here’s the second video on copying and pasting screens:

Our text help doesn’t integrate adding screens and copying and pasting, so we think the videos are an important step in introducing a powerful workBench tool and efficiency.

We’re a little late for Halloween, but maybe not. It doesn’t take much extra imagination to conjure that they may always be with us, not just on one night in late October.

From ghoulies and ghosties, and four-legged beasties, and things that go bump in the night . . . Good Lord, deliver us! - so proclaimed the Scottish Prayer Book. It’s not clear if the ghoulies are the worst, or those nasty night-bumpers.

Whatever. There’s been devilry done in the workBench Library. the Gs, F-LBs, or NBs somehow got inside and melded pictures into otherworldly visions of their world and ours overlapping. Very spooky. Click on the right side of their mayhem to see their next vision. Click on the left side to go back. If you’re fearless, click on the “+” button in the top left corner to open Pandora’s Box.

How could they have figured out that you can drag an image in from the workBench Library, make it the screen’s background, drag in another image and expand it to cover the whole screen, then drop the top image’s “Visibility” with the slider to meld the two pictures into a “double exposure”?

Uncanny.

If you’re drawn into this devilry, be sure not to nod off while jiggling images and reciting incantations. You might awake to find yourself sandwiched between the images and trapped in digital bits forever. Yikes. Your whole existence is slithered into a file - until someone deletes you.