A Tour Of The Templates

While some of the core books are linear like the Octopus book, many of them use other formats. Here is the opening page of Hummingbirds, a book from the "Exploring the Taiga Forest" unit that uses a table of contents layout to break up the content into logical and manageable chunks.

Students can click on or scan to the bullhorn buttons at any point to have text read aloud. They can also click an individual word to have it read aloud. This particular content book has insightful questions for the student at the end of each chapter. Students write their answers into Clicker Writer from inside the book.

This page with the cactuses appears in Hiking the Desert Adventure, one of the books from "Exploring the Desert". Many of the content books use this "choose your adventure" format. After opening the book from a cover page, students have a choice at the end of each new page. There are fifteen pages and eight different end points in this type of book.

Because students choose their own route to explore, each student will have a different experience, much like exploring in the real world. Students typically read these stories many times, and have the experience of mapping out their possible routes. They are encouraged to take notes so that they can later write about their adventures.

Pop-up grids are a powerful option in Clicker 5®. They are used to bring up word banks and on-screen keyboards. Below on the left is a book page from the Tropical Rainforests book. On the right is the same page with an open custom vocabulary pop-up. Custom vocabulary appropriate to each unit is available via popup grid for both reference and to scaffold writing throughout the various gridsets.

In the content books, clicking on a word on this pop-up grid gives the student an auditory definition of the word. Clicking on the same word within a writing gridset inserts the word into the writing space, either the cell or textbox on a book journal page, or into Clicker Writer in the second journal format. See below for a description of both these journal templates.

Videos can also be launched to play from a pop-up grid, which then can be closed out of the way. Here in the Ocean Research Adventure, from "Exploring the Oceans", a graphic background simulates the control panel of a remotely operated submersible.

The student clicks to operate the camera and sees and hears the view and comments of the oceanographers. These interactive elements help students to control the pace at which they access the material.

The comprehension and sorting gridsets also make use of pop-up grids. In this comprehension gridset that covers the material in the anchor book Savannas from "Exploring the Savanna", a photo page is followed by a page with three questions. Students open a pop-up for each question and select the correct answer from among four choices.

You can identify comprehension gridsets on the start grids, because they always begin with "What Do You Know About.." In the sorting activities, the pop-up grids have a list of items, and students open the list and click on the items to insert the correct set into two different cells, one for each of the two biomes used in the word sort.

Writing is a vital part of each biome unit. Since Clicker 5® is first and foremost a writing tool, many excellent formats for writing are possible. We have developed two journal templates for this project, one of which utilizes Clicker Writer and one of which enables a student to create a printable book.

The page to the left is part of a book journal from "Exploring the Tropical Rainforest". The pop-up grid gives students a choice of 16 photos from one of the content books to insert into the large cell on the page.

They then write about what they remember from their explorations in the text box below the photo. When they finish the exercise, they can print the book or share it onscreen. Their book will have the same finished appearance as the core content books.

The second journal format utilizes Clicker Writer®. Pages alternate between a photo with a caption, and a page with access to Clicker Writer. Below left is one of the photo pages from Exploring the Swamp, a Writer-type journal from the "Exploring the Wetlands" unit.

On the right is a Clicker Writer page with a question about the preceding photo for the student to answer. Part of the custom vocabulary pop-up for the Wetlands unit is visible. Students can click on the pop-up items to insert the words. They will write a conventional essay from this journal template and save as a Document from Clicker Writer.