How to Use the Project and Lesson Sharing Area

This area of the forum will be used to share final AfA projects with everyone on the social network. This way everyone can benefit from seeing, using and providing feedback on any of the projects from participants across the state. Additionally, this area will continue to be used as a project and lesson repository for sharing and searching for lessons.

In order to keep lessons organized and searchable, we will be posting instructions here on how to add lessons to share as well as how to find lessons within the site. The key to making this work is through the use of "tags". Tags are keywords that describe an item, in this case a project or lesson plan. When you post a project or lesson plan to this area it is important to include multiple appropriate tags so that the lesson can be found easily by other teachers using the search feature. This process is simple, and is clearly described in the instructional sheet below.

Note: It takes they system some time to recognize tags and include them in the search. So if you submit a project or lesson it may take a few hours before it shows up in the search.

For complete instructions on how to use the Project and Lesson Sharing Area, including how to add a project/lesson or how to find a project/lesson click here.

Lessons will be collected and posted here beginning on Friday, February 5th. If you have any questions about this area of the site, please ask questions or add comments by replying below.

Tags: instructions

Attachments:

lesson_sharing_instructions.pdf, 608 KB

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Permalink Reply by Joel Flint on September 12, 2010 at 13:58

Question:

For those teachers/schools who are using Window XP operating system and not Windows 7, how could they open attachments that are in the docx format, short of converting each of those attachments to a doc or rtf file so that Windows XP can open those particular files that are attached within AFA lessons, etc.?

I use ZamZar (free online service) to do this and sometimes it can be rather quick while other times it can take over a day.

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Permalink Reply by David Young on September 13, 2010 at 9:23

Joel- This is a good point. There are a few options available. First, let me clarify that the difference is not related to XP/Windows 7, but it is related to the version of Office you are running. Starting with Office 2007 the new file formats were added, regardless of if you are in Windows XP, Vista, or 7.

Microsoft provides an add-on for older versions of Office that will allow you to open/edit files with the .docx (or xlsx or pptx) extensions. You can download it for free here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=941b347... (this is for office 2003/XP, if anyone has something older you can probably search for and find a similar add on at Microsoft's site). I would recommend that anyone not using Office 2007 do this, regardless of AfA related issues. It's a helpful thing to have.

However, Those of us with Office 2007 should be mindful of our colleagues. In Office 2007 you can choose to save your files in the old format. I personally try to do this on any files I post or email because you never know what the target audience has. Unfortunately, not everyone with Office 2007 is aware of this or knows how to save in the old format. I will update the instructions above to recommend doing so for any documents posted to this site.

-David