Barbara's Pre-K Classroom:

Integrating Intellipics into the Curriculum

Barbara, a veteran teacher with 31 years of professional experience, explored the value of IntelliPics in the Pre-K classroom with the help of the STAR Tech project staff as part of our 1:1 Assistance program. IntelliPics enables teachers to design customized activities for young students through features such as drawing and painting tools, "IntelliMation" for creating animations, and "IntelliQuiz" for making quiz activities. The program includes a library of pictures and sounds but also gives users the option of including media from outside sources, such as Print Shop and Boardmaker. When students select pictures within an activity, the pictures may play recorded sounds and/or move in a variety of ways. Students can experiment with making pictures move, grow, and multiply. This vignette shows Barbara’s evolution across four "steps" as she integrates IntelliPics into her curriculum.

Step 1

The first step in exploring how to use IntelliPics involved our showing Barbara how to insert pictures into a frame, change the color and number of objects on the screen, and use synthesized or recorded speech. Since she wanted to put her new skills to good use immediately, Barbara designed an IntelliPics activity to expand the vocabulary of the children in her class whose native language was Spanish. Many needed a boost in learning English. Since the topic of the day was transportation—air, land, and water travel, she decided these words would be good candidates for an activity that integrated IntelliPics.

First, to set the context, Barbara had students search the classroom for relevant pictures and toys of planes, boats, trains, and busses. Next, they used the short vocabulary program she had developed by placing pictures of a boat, car, train, plane, and bus on the left side of the screen. Each time the child clicked on one of these pictures, the Spanish word would appear on the right side of the screen and the English word at the top of the page. Barbara’s voice, previously recorded, would say the word, first in Spanish and then in English. She used some of the features of the software to build in more interactivity. Students could change the graphics by making them bigger ("growing"), making them smaller ("melting"), changing them to a different color, and/or changing the number of each item.

Barbara described in detail what happened when Dominic and Esteban tried this activity as a team:

The activity started off really well with Dominic and Esteban both fully engaged. "Move it [the mouse] there, no there," urged Esteban as he touched the screen with his finger. Following his partner’s direction, Dominic clicked on the picture of a boat. When he did so, the computer said"barco" in Spanish and "boat" in English. Both boys repeated the words "barco" and "boat." Dominic then took control of the mouse and clicked on the next picture in the activity. A picture of a train appeared, and the computer repeated "tren" and "train." Both boys spoke each word carefully. If one made a mistake, the other one corrected him. Marina, a student who speaks Greek, watched silently behind them, mouthing the English words to herself.

Barbara was moderately pleased but not completely satisfied with the outcome of the activity. On the positive side, the program had helped Dominic and Esteban practice their English for selected words. But on the negative side, the program did not sustain their interest for more than 10 minutes. They became bored once the novelty wore off. She questioned the pace of her activity and the level of interactivity. Other than moving the mouse to click on the picture, making modifications to the graphics, and listening to and repeating the words aloud, there was little else for the children to do. By continuing to explore IntelliPics, Barbara thought she might solve the problem.

Step 2

Working as collaborators with Barbara, we helped her learn how to import pictures into IntelliPics from other programs, such as ClarisWorks and Print Shop. This included learning how to select, cut, and paste pictures directly into an activity or into the program’s picture library for future use.

With her growing expertise and knowledge that involving students in making books was motivating and interactive, Barbara used IntelliPics to create a class book titled Food Around the World. The book was a compilation of short, personalized, "little books." Using the well-loved book The Very Hungry Caterpillar as the model, she helped each student create a short, personalized book called The Very Hungry ______{e.g., Esteban}. Barbara explained how she had worked with her students:

First, I asked the children what they like to eat when they are very, very, hungry. When they named a food, I searched through my clip art libraries to find a picture of it. Then I pasted it onto a blank page along with their name. I continued modeling the book that way, which is much easier to do on the computer than writing it out each day. I printed the book and sent it home with each child’s page accompanied by a note asking parents to talk with the child about other foods they like to eat. I asked the parents to write those foods on the back of the picture, and return it on the next Friday. On Friday, as follow-up to this activity, the children "drew" or "painted" pictures of their favorite foods (per their parents’ notes).

Barbara commented that the strategy of combining the computer and noncomputer activities worked well because the focus was on the individual child and his or her likes and dislikes. Her students felt acknowledged and valued because, she believed, they were featured in the class book they had helped to write. But could she improve on the activity to make even "better" books?

Step 3

One way to make better books was to beef up the graphics and tap into students’ imaginations by adding digital pictures. We showed Barbara how to take pictures of objects and people in her class and how to transfer pictures from other sources into the software program Fireworks to edit them for use in IntelliPics.

Setting to work, Barbara used IntelliPics to create a large class book modeled after the book Brown Bear, Brown Bear by Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle. The class book contained a page about each child in the class. The page included a digital picture of the child and a sentence with the child’s name, for example:

Mari, Mari, what do you see?
I see a _________________ looking at me.

Barbara worked individually with each child at the computer to complete his or her page. First, she asked the child to record his or her name. Then she asked the child to identify an object in the classroom. She typed that word into the template. Once the text was completed it was time to read back the sentences on the page. First, Barbara read the text aloud; then the computer read the text, inserting the child’s own voice saying his or her name; and then the child read the text aloud.

Barbara also wanted to create a hard-copy version of the book. Before each individual session with a child ended, she asked the child to select the object he or she had named and bring it over to a large table covered with butcher-block paper. Then she photographed the object with the digital camera. The following day, Barbara printed out the book and distributed the individual pages to each child. She helped the children paste the photograph of the object they had chosen onto their page. They could then decorate the page using crayons, markers, or paint. Barbara assembled the pages and tied them together using a ribbon to create the class book.

The culminating activity involved reading both the computer and hard-copy versions of the book. Barbara wanted to show the children how they had progressed from the computer program to the printed form.

Step 4

The fourth step in Barbara’s evolution was motivated by her desire to strengthen the science curriculum. Since she was planning a unit on the incubation and hatching of chicks she asked if there was a visual tool to catch and hold her students’ interest as they waited for the chicks to hatch. She wondered if there were other computer programs she could use besides IntelliPics to create a short movie.

We showed Barbara how to use the frame-by-frame animation capabilities within the QuickTime movie feature of ClarisWorks. To enable Barbara to create her own movie, we demonstrated the features of ClarisWorks and discussed how she could download pictures from the Internet to include in the movie.

Barbara translated her new skills into practice by preparing three different materials, all aimed at helping her students build science concepts about incubation and hatching:

• QuickTime Movie. Soon after her session with C.G., Barbara began to hunt for pictures of incubation on the Internet. She located a site that modeled the same incubation process she wished to repeat with her class. It contained pictures of young children turning and spraying eggs. She downloaded the pictures to her computer and then turned the file into a QuickTime movie. The whole class viewed the movie once each week to determine what happened to the eggs they had sprayed and turned over. In addition, the students could play the movie on their own with little help from Barbara or the aide. The movie allowed the children to "see the eggs hatch before they hatched in the classroom."
  
  
• Hard-Copy Book. Barbara also printed the images from the movie onto individualized pages and tied them together with ribbon to create a hard-copy book for her library.
  
  
• Slide Show. Barbara used IntelliPics to create a slide show. She used different common shapes (e.g., circle, triangle, and line) to create an animated picture of a chick. Each slide used a different shape to represent an element of the chick’s body. Through a series of slides, the students saw a picture of a chick develop.
  

Image from Barbara’s Slide Show

Barbara saw evidence that her students were developing science concepts and math skills along with literacy skills. For example, the students’ comments indicated that they understood the causal relationship—how watering and turning over the eggs resulted in the hatching of the eggs. The combination of the three materials helped the students "to understand counting and time concepts and a sequence of events."

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