In the IntelliTools Classroom Suite® New section, there is a clever template in the Language Arts folder called Phonics Template. The designer of the template wanted to build an activity in which a child could practice sorting words by word family or "rimes". 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.

As designed, the template has a tray or toolbar at the bottom of the page with 16 buttons, and four more buttons for rimes across the top of a sorting grid. A teacher setting up the template would insert four letter combinations into the four upper buttons to establish four rime categories, and would insert both a picture and button name into the 16 bottom buttons. In the standard template description it says to put "rimes" in and then insert four pictures for each of the four "rime" categories, but the template is really designed to "sort" anything in a random fashion. The last step in setting up the template is to click "Finish Activity", which would then hide the picture toolbar at the bottom.

When a student using the finished activity clicks the Word Box button, a picture chosen randomly from the hidden toolbar is inserted and the item name (the button name field) is read aloud. The student would drag the picture to the grid and snap it into a square beneath the matching category. A child who did not recognize the picture could drag it to the magic mirror, where the name would appear in the box beside it.

Image automatically scales to fit the grid box, but...	...on the mirror, the full sized photo obscures the name box.

This template works beautifully with clip art, but Byron discovered a limitation when he used some of his digital photos in the picutre tray buttons. The photos were much bigger than the clip art items. This was not a problem if the user dragged the picture directly to the sorting grid, because the grid automatically resized the photo to fit. But Byron found that it was impossible to use the magic mirror to display the item name, because the image was so large that it covered both the mirror and the name box beside it. Naturally Byron was determined to use those photos! So he modified the template to make it easy to use them.

The action "Make Smaller" is inserted four times. The reduced image fits on the mirror without obscuring the name box.

What Byron has designed is a version of the Phonics Template that is optimized for use with digital photos. He added four "Make Smaller" actions to each of the 16 picture tray buttons. The effect is to automatically scale down those big digital photo images as they are inserted. The reduced image is small enough so that it can be dragged onto the mirror without obscuring the name box. Keep in mind that you will not want to use this amended template for clip art. The images would be scaled down too much. But for digital photos, it works like magic!

To see an example of the kind of activity you might make with this template, go to our Goodies section by clicking this link. To download the Photo Sort template, click here.