Teacher Start

My classroom includes 24 Macintosh G4 computers with Macromedia Flash, Adobe Photoshop and systems that support them. Our students are not permitted to access their email accounts but the system has an At Ease interface which keeps the hard drives secure. It includes an electronic "hand in" and "hand out" feature and the teacher station is connected to an LCD projector.

The only book I refer to is Macromedia Studio MX Step-by-Step Projects; May, 2002; Macromedia, Inc.; San Francisco, CA. Look for it at http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/sales/.

The lesson, like the class, can be taught by one teacher acting as a facilitator. On the other hand, a good lab tech is essential for keeping everybody online and I usually bother our head of technology and one other tech-savvy teacher for input as well. Finally, don't overlook those kids in each class with the pocket protectors and thick glasses. You can only solve one problem at a time and a couple of advanced students can help a great deal when you're bogged down. These kids will be leaders of their respective groups as well.

1. http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/bluewebn/ -- Clicked on Technology for the search category, then narrow the search by choosing "high school">"tutorial." My search turned up 14 items. This one is helpful as an introduction to Flash, its uses and some related programs.

2. http://www.state-of-entropy.com/ Click on Art>Visual Arts for the search category. I got 75 items without narrowing the search. This is an interesting site for creating graphics to use in animations and web page designs.

4. http://www.virtual-fx.net/vfx/ A site with an extensive collection of downloadable tutorials to create specific projects. Found with a simple Google Search for "Flash Tutorials that produced over 800,000 results!

5. http://www.actionscripts.org/tutorials.shtml This page is from a site devoted specifically to the Actionscript language, one of the more involved of Flash's tools for animation. It has tutorials for all levels. Found with Altavista's "more precision" search, I asked for Flash Tutorials" containing the exact phrase "actionscript" (although it's obviously not a phrase), without the words "paysite" or "$." It still gleaned over 55,000 items.