Tools
Quick Steps to Creating Learning Centers
STEP 1: Decide on a topic or idea
Educators call it the "enduring understanding" -- the "take-away" that a visitor to a Learning Center will keep. What's your central idea? The point of the learning center? Your thesis or argument? The images and videos you choose, and the text you write, will all flow from the enduring understanding you want to share.
1. Enduring Understandings
STEP 2: Decide on your audience
What audience do you think will be most interested in your Learning Center? If you are a teacher, your audience might be other teachers or students. If you are a parent, perhaps you want to share with other parents. Keep in mind that choosing one primary audience does not eliminate other audiences, but the choice will help you select images, videos, content, and strategies for interacting with those resources. Now select the appropriate template for your audience (Teaching, Professional Development, or Traditional Knowledge).
2. Pick a template
STEP 3: Begin to build a Learning Center
Now you can actually start building the Learning Center by naming it.
You can add stanzas. Stanzas can contain images, videos and text. You can move stanzas up and down the page to organize your Learning Center. Learning Centers also have sections, which work like chapters, in case you have a lot share. If you find that a page takes more than one or two scrolls to get to the bottom, consider dividing it up into chapters.
3. Add stanzas
STEP 4: Find and add Resources
Now find the images and videos for your Learning Center. Browse ECHOSpace to gather image and video resources to make your Learning Center vibrant and compelling. To gather a resource, login, go to the Resources tab, look through the existing resources, and click the "save" button under any that will fit your Learning Center's purpose and theme. Your chosen resources will be added to your My Profile Page, and can then be used on Learning Centers that you create.
If you have resources on your computer that you want to add to a Learning Center, you can upload your own videos or images to ECHOSpace by selecting the appropriate Upload button that appears in the sidebar, then browsing your computer's files and making a selection. Acceptable images can be in .jpg .gif or .png formats, but this site does not support .tiff files. Videos can be up to 1 GB in size and up to 10 minutes in length.
4. Illustrate using your images or ours
STEP 5: Tag your Learning Center so others can find it
Categories help others find your Learning Centers. Add categories that reflect some of the key points of your Learning Center.
5. Add categories
Visit How To Use ECHOSpace for more tips.
