What is JimLearn?

All the lessons have been created to teach young children the art of reading and writing as well as basic maths. I have started with the alphabet and will try to bring in vowels, double letters etc. as time goes on.

There will also be a few stories and perhaps a few games in the future. Reading is the key to knowledge and I firmly believe we should encourage every child to start as soon as it is practicable.

There is no one method better than any other, however, I was always taught that if you can see the words as you write them and you can also hear them then you are using your brain to it’s fullest capacity. In other words, using as many senses as possible when learning helps to retain knowledge. I have created these lessons with this in mind.

I have tried to bring a light hearted approach in the lessons for the young. the enclosed lessons are colourful and give plenty of hands on experience. Although computers are wonderful machines, children still need to get pen and paper and start writing.

I have recently restructured the site to make it a lot simpler to use. This has been achieved by making use of buttons for navigation and getting away from the ‘Blog’ appearance. Now enjoy, click the ‘go back’ button below to go to the home page, then click a button to choose the lessons. Choosing ‘letters’ then the alphabet is a good place to start.

Captivate and Articulate

All the lessons were either created in Articulate or in Adobe Captivate. I used both because of the suitability of each program to the lessons I was creating. All the english lessons were created using Adobe Captivate, which I found very easy to use. By design, it is similar to other presentation programs I have used in the past. There are easily understood tools for creating the various click boxes, rollover captions, and sidelets. By using these tools, the creation of enduser involvement becomes straightforward.

Before you start go to Edit/Preferences to set up how you want the slides to be displayed, this saves a lot of heartache later on. There are three views, edit, storyline and branching, and that tells a story, your presentation can be as complicated as you want it to be.

Captivate can import sounds and images.  It is possible to record sound directly but when I attempted this , the sound was recorded only on one channel. To overcome this, I recorded all sound in NCH Wavepad and then imported the audio, then used the Captivate sound editor to cut to the tracks to length. There is a simple image editor in the programme, but don’t expect too much of it, you would be better creating all outside then import the images in as you require them. All images were created in Adobe Illustrator. There is a time line for adjusting the timing of entry points for images and sound as well as captions to be displayed, no problem here, everything worked like clockwork.

When you have completed you can publish to Flash (SWF) files, email, FTP to your website   server etc. If you are creating for the web and use wordpress, then the Flash files will play direct from your media library on pages or post. Finally, there is a quiz slide, which can be edited to suit your needs, this will keep scores for your questions.

If you can use powerpoint or any other similar presentation programme, then you will certainly be able to use Captivate. However I is expensive, so I would suggest downloading a free trial to start with from www.adobe.com

For the maths lessons I used Articulate which I found to be a little disjointed at times.  I used Engage for the teaching and used Quizmaker for the quizzes. Once again, as with captivate you create a slide, import pictures, drawings and sounds and use a time line to time the entry of your parts to complete your master piece. Quizmaker is a work of art, very easy to produce a quiz  with many options such as multiple choice or response, fill in the blank, word blank, drag and drop and hotspots to name a few options it is the ideal choice for making standard quizzes.

I found that using hotspots was an excellent way to create areas on photos and drawings that are to be clicked to get the correct answer in the quiz. Basic graphic tools but are usable as can be seen in my examples. Once you get used to the way the questions are added, your production will speed up, I copied and amended slides quite a lot, also there is the option when editing to go directly to the next or previous slide. This saves a lot of mouse clicking.

Publishing is very easy, however the SWF files cannot be used directly from Wordpress library , instead the folder of files have to be uploaded to your server and then called as player.html  file in order to play on your blog. Having said that it really is no hassle, very easy to do. Because I wanted to run an engage presentation followed by one or in some cases two quizzes, I used Articulate Presenter which works in Microsoft Presenter . The engage presentation goes on the first slide followed by the Quiz on the second slide followed if you want by as many quizzes as you like. When published it is a seamless transition from one to another.

And again, try before you buy by downloading a free trial from www.Articulate.com