Tips and Tricks

As an Apprentice, you probably have used the Classroom Suite applications enough to look through the finished activities and have tried some templates. You're ready to begin experimenting with creating very simple activities from scratch, or with adding elements to finished activities.

As a Journeyman, you continue learning the new apprentice tips as they are posted, but you are also ready to tackle slightly more complex operations. You know how to edit buttons and graphics, so you can begin using a finished activity as a template, completely changing its content to create something new. Or, you might change the actions in buttons or pages to improve or enhance activities.

As a Master Wizard, you know many tricks and general strategies for creating and modifying activities, but of course you check out the new apprentice and journeyman tips to collect even more. You are ready to tackle projects that involve more than one application, more than one document, or advanced ways to combine basic elements such as buttons and movies.

If you add the Read All action to a button in IntelliTalk 3®, it reads out the page when it is clicked. But if you add it to a button in IPS3, it probably won't read the entire page when it's clicked. It might not do anything! It takes a little wizardly know-how to use this action effectively in IntelliPics Studio 3®. Find out how!

The most powerful trick you can learn is Control+Click, the key to opening up anything in Classroom Suite. Once you know that, you can ferret out all the mysteries of how activities work! You'll also be able to make little changes to finished activities, to customize them. Download a set of strategy tips to help in your explorations.

Actually, there is an entire Colors category which includes a specific Color button action for each standard color. Download an example activity that shows how you might animate a graphic picture, and then have a student click a button to change its color!

There are several actions that affect toolbars: Hide Toobar (specific name), Show Toobar (specific name), Swtch to Toolbar (specific name), and Hide All Toolbars. This tip gives you some ideas about how you might combine these actions in a complex activity. As always, one of the best ways to learn is by taking apart an activity that uses this trick., so be ready to download a tutorial example activity and two Goodies that make use of these tricks.

Sounds can add information and realism to activities and books created in such applications as IntelliTools Classroom Suite® and My Own Bookshelf®. A good sound editor can help you prepare sounds to use in your creations. We've found a freeware editor that seems to function well on both Mac OSX and Windows XP.

If you have a digital camera, you have a powerful tool for building activites in applications such as IntelliTools Classroom Suite® and My Own Bookshelf®. It is fairly easy to transfer those digital photos into your computer. All that talk about pixels and megapixels may be a little confusing, however, when you begin to think about using the photos.

One of the powerful options available to the aspiring wizard in IntelliPics Studio 3® is the ability to create custom toolbars, with buttons that can do all kinds of things. Here is a quick guide to some of the basic ways you can create and use these Custom Toolbars.

The power of an invisible button is that you can place it anywhere on a page background to create an active "hot spot". Insert a photo into the page background, position your buttons, and you are ready to create a non-linear activity where the user clicks on part of the picture to cause various actions.

Have you ever recorded a sound in IntelliPics Studio3®, and then wished you could use it in another activity? Probably you recorded that sound as a Page Sound, and there is no way to move it directly into another activity. But there is a magic trick to moving sounds in pages and page buttons, so that they are available to other documents in Classroom Suite.

By default, you can easily record one sound and have it play as the page sound in IPS3. Have you ever wanted to play two sounds, or even an entire sequence of sounds on a page? Here's how!

If you have tried IntelliMation at all, you can probably make something move across the page. If this success has inspired all kinds of ideas for using animation, you can save yourself time by learning the answers to some questions. Download this activity, follow the instructions on each page, and you will have several new tricks in your pocket for quickly creating exciting IntelliMations.

Here is some real magic for graphics such as photos. The Transform Tools on the IPS3 Authoring Toolbar and the picture properties settings combined with IntelliMation give you the power to have photos fly in, spin, shrink or grow, open from a skinny line, and more!

A new blank template for IntelliPics Studio 3® or IntelliMathics 3® has a border around the page area. By default, the IPS3 border is a light peach color, and the IM3 border is a pale pink. You can change either of these to a solid window color, to a pattern, or to a custom color. The same choices are available for the background of the IntelliTalk 3® window, and the procedure is the same, so that will also be covered in this tip.

For both Page Buttons (IPS3) and Custom Toolbar buttons (all three apps), there is a wide choice of button styles. The default button style, Beveled, and one other style, Flat, have the option of custom color. Here's how to change the color to the exact hue you desire.

One of the most versatile skills for a student wizard is making a page button. By adding a picture or choosing a button style, you can customize its appearance. You can change its size and place it wherever you need it on a page. Best of all, the button can have one or more actions and an attached sound. Download a short tutorial that will guide you in your first use of buttons.

In the IntelliTools Classroom Suite® New section, there is a clever template in the Language Arts folder called Phonics Template. Since the important thing was to have a sorting grid in the activity, the author used Intellimathics 3® even though the curriculum area is Language Arts. This template works beautifully with clip art, but Byron discovered a limitation when he used some of his digital photos in the picture tray buttons. Naturally Byron was determined to use those photos! So he modified the template to make it easy to use them.

IntelliTools Classroom Suite® ships a very popular errorless writing template, Easy Writing. While the finished activities are indeed very easy and fun for students, creating new activities with the template can be tricky unless you understand some of its quirks. This tip will explain some of these, and at the end there is a link to download a modified Easy Writing template that avoids two of these pitfalls entirely.

In the IntelliTools Classroom Suite® New/Templates section, there is a very useful IntelliTalk 3® template, the Diagram Template. One option with this template is to add your own diagram or picture to the toolbar. If the picture is full-page size, then the answer fields seem to vanish. Actually, they have dropped down to the next page. There is no way to resize a picture within IntelliTalk 3®. Learning Magic has created a "helper" document in IntelliPics Studio 3® to resize the picture and also make it simple to add the letter labels to a photo or diagram.