Tutorial for using iEARN's Collaboration Center

Using Features of the iEARN Collaboration Center

The iEARN Collaboration Center is an interactive space with a number of online tools for students and teachers to use in their collaboration and project work. New tools are added periodically and we welcome your ideas as to how it can be enhanced to facilitate online collaboration and social networking.

This tutorial will introduce the five general areas of the Collaboration Center: MANAGE ACCOUNT, PROJECTS, PEOPLE, GALLERY, and FORUMS

Teachers need to be in the iEARN database to be able to participate in the 200+ WWW-based project forums and albums. If you are not yet in the iEARN Teacher Database, please register now! A copy of your registration will go to your country coordinator. Student information cannot be accessed by anyone other than their teacher, who is responsible for registering their User Names and passwords.

Logging in: To enter the iEARN Collaboration Center, go to http://media.iearn.org. Log-in by clicking on "Login" at the upper right corner of the Collaboration Center page. You enter the iEARN Collaboration Center with your unique User Name, which is generally your: firstname_lastname, and your password. Please note than an underscore (Jose_Garcia) is required between names. No space are allowed.

SECTION 1: MANAGE ACCOUNT: All teachers and other adults in the database have a personal "Profile" page. This is the page which contains your current contact information, including your photo, e-mail address, etc. After logging into the website, you can update and complete your personal profile by clicking on "Manage Account" next to the "log-out" link. In your profile, you can upload a photo or image, complete or change your personal contact information and place yourself on a Google map of iEARN teachers

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As a way of walking you through this tutorial, we have created a sample teacher named Alberto Rodriguez in Venezuela. When Alberto logs in to the Collaboration Center and password, and goes to "Manage Account" he is taken to his personal "Profile Page" and is now ready to look at and update his information.

By clicking on "Edit, "Alberto sees that he needs to add additional information:

1. a photo so that other teachers can know who they are talking to
2. Personal information, like his school's name and street address
3. his school's WWW page address
4. languages he speaks

By clicking on "Submit" Alberto (and you) can add this information.

Alberto can also "place himself on the globe" by going to a Google map and clicking on his city or community. He can move the map with his mouse and zoom in on Caracas, Venezuela. Clicking on the map puts a flag for Alberto's location. Remember to both "save" the coordinates and then submit the changes to the profile.

Giving Students Their own User Names

By clicking on "Add Students" at the left, Albert can give his students their own iEARN Usernames and passwords to access the project discussion forums. Student Usernames become active in about 15 minutes from when you "submit" them. These can be updated, changed, or deleted by clicking on "My Students."

Note: Information on students cannot be searched or accessed by iEARN members or anyone outside of iEARN. It only appears on the "My Students" page, to which only their teacher has access.

We encourage iEARN participants to use First and Last Names so others will know who they are working with in the Forums. We recognize that this presents problems for some schools and it may be necessary to Register a student as Amanda_D (with no last name)

All fields must be completed. If students do not have their own e-mail addresses, they will need to be registered with a school or teacher's address. This is necessary to avoid anonymous postings. You can edit any of this registration information at any time.

After completing the form, click on "submit." If there is no other iEARN participant by the same name, it is accepted and sent for processing. If there is already a student by that name, the database will assign a number at the end of your student's Username so he/she will have a unique Username. Your students will be able to access the forums in about 15-30 minutes after the database automatically changes their record from "pending" to "active"

You can register as many additional students as you wish.

If you click on "My students," you can see (and edit) the students which are under your account. You can also get to the page by going to: http://media.iearn.org/my_students?status=active

Any student whose record is "active" can 1) access the iEARN project forums; 2) read project descriptions and 3) see all student media in the GALLERY (See below).

Sometimes teachers are accidentally entered as students. If this happens, teachers can click on"upgrade to teacher" and on "submit" to change their status.

SECTION 2: PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS SECTION

By clicking on the PROJECTS tab, you will come to the entry point of iEARN project descriptions:

Each time Alberto visits this page, he will see four different selected projects. In addition to a brief description of the project, there is a link to its full description. These descriptions are open to anyone on the WWW to give those outside of iEARN a sense of the breadth of project work in our network. By clicking on "Project Index," Alberto can receive a list of ALL iEARN projects, sorted alphabetically.

On this page Alberto can search for projects that fit his interests. Since he teaches environmental science, he is interested in those that involve "water." So he typed in "water" in the Keyword field under "Find Projects" on the left side of the page and clicks on "Search." Four projects are found, with links to them:

Alberto is interested in the Water Habitat Project after reading the description.

He and his students can join the discussion forum for the project by clicking on "Forum" (see below).

SECTION 3: PEOPLE SECTION

The PEOPLE Section is a place to find colleagues worldwide who share common interests, obtain their contact information and to get to know the people with whom you are working.

Because he has logged in as a member of iEARN, when Alberto lands on this page he sees six teachers selected randomly from those who have posted photos in their profile. Clicking on their name takes him to their profile page to get to know more abou them. If Alberto clicks on the Google map, it will load in a separate window (takes some time) and he can zoom into specific countries and cities to link with educators who are in those areas of the world.

On the PEOPLE page, he can also search for educators by their name, school name, country, city, language and school level, He would like to see educators in Argentina in order for his students to interact in Spanish with other students, so he selects "Argentina" in the search field "By country."

He is quite surprised to see over 2,600 teachers in Argentina appear, initially sorted alphabetically by last name. He can sort them by different categories, by clicking the name of the category along the top of the page.

By clicking on their name, Alberto can see the profile and contact information of each of these teachers. He can also re-sort them by different criteria by clicking on the title of the columns (First Name, Last Name, Institution, City, etc.).

SECTION FOUR: GALLERY SECTION

The GALLERY section: Click on the “Gallery” button on the navigation bar on the top. This is the large “Media Gallery” in which each project has an “Album” of student and teacher photos, videos, documents, and other files for viewing at any time by people within iEARN. Each time you go to the GALLERY, there will be six different random links to different project albums.

The GALLERY is the place for student and teacher media work to be stored and viewed. The total number of student media items appears in the upper left corner. The items in it are accessible only to iEARN participants until a teacher marks the work as “public” and viewable by anyone on the Internet.

Members of iEARN can also upload media files (up to 45 mb) by clicking on “Got Media? Upload Here” on the left. You can go to a project’s Album in the GALLERY by selecting the project under “Jump to Album.”Alberto can search the GALLERY’s contents or those of a particular project album by keywords, media type, country of the student/teacher who submitted the item and/or by the person’s name.

Alberto is interested in knowing that media has been uploaded that deals with water, so he does a Search by keyword for "water" and finds a number of photos and videos that have been uploaded in various project albums. Clicking on any of them takes him to the specific media and album.

Alberto sees that the video "thumbnails" look like film. He could also do a search by "Media type" if he wanted to find only videos. After his students upload media to their project albums, Alberto can search for his own hame "By Teacher Name" and see all the media submitted by his students. Since he knows that hs is interested in the "Water Habitat Project" he can also select that particular project's album under "Jump to Album" on the left side of the page.

SECTION FIVE: FORUM SECTION

5) By clicking on the FORUMS tab at the top navigation bar, Alberto sees the main entry page to iEARN project discussion forums:

Alberto is familiar with iEARN's discussion forums, which generally look and function as they have in the past. One key enhancement in our new forums is the uploading and displaying of images, photos, videos or other files. Alberto would like to post a message in the Teachers Forum to introduce himself and his class with several photos. After writing his message, he clicks on“attach file” he is asked to write a title, summary, keywords and description of the image.

It is very important to read the "iEARN Copyright and Privacy Agreement" before uploading media--particularly media with the images of students. When media is uploaded by students or teachers as part of a project, it is visible only to people within iEARN. The teacher can decide when to make the media public so that anyone with access to the WWW can view the media.

When images, photos, videos, documents, etc are uploaded from within the forums, a thumbnail of the file is placed in the forum topic, with a link to the actual file which is in the GALLERY. Students can see what they are discussing. Clicking on the thumbnail takes Alberto to the media in the project's album in the GALLERY. There appears the text that was entered when the media was "attached."

When in the GALLERY, if the image is uploaded from the forums, a link is provided to enable the viewer to go directly to the forum discussion topic from which it was posted. So, if someone is browsing the GALLERY, they can be directed to the place in the forums where this media was discussed and uploaded. Practice uploading photos and other files in the Practice Forum.