Using the Resource Browser

As we move throughout this chapter, we'll be utilizing the browsers on the left-hand side of the page often. In fact, each video is going to focus on one of the individual browsers and how we can use that browser in order to create interactive elements. If at any time you'd like to see the final work that we'll be building, or double-check your own work. You can open up the interactive presentations flip chart, which is located in chapter four of the exercise files. To get us started, I've created a blank flip chart called genotypes. It has no elements added to it. It just has one blank page. Let's go ahead and get started by adding some resources to this particular chart.

Now, throughout this course already, we've added various objects and some text to our pages. And then we were able to style those texts and those objects. But creating every single element from the ground up can take a lot of time. And as educators, we don't have the ability to spend that much time on each individual lesson. Build directly into activinspire is a resource browser with pre-created elements that we can add to our own pages. This can save us countless hours as we start creating presentations for our students. To access the resource browser, we're going to click on the resource browser icon in the browser window.

If for some reason this browser window is closed, you can always bring it back by going to View and then selecting Browsers. Now when you installed Active Inspire, you are also installing the shared resource library. By making sure you're on the shared resource library, which you can do by clicking on the shared resources icon. Here we have a variety of things we can automatically add to our Active Inspire page, such as activities and templates, backgrounds, and even lesson building tools. Let's go and get started by adding a background for this particular page. Under the backgrounds, I'm going to go and select illustrations.

Now, at the very bottom, I can see there are 14 different illustrations I can quickly add to this page. If, for some reason, this view of this bottom section is different on your computer it could be that you're viewing either large icons, or that you have this in list mode. By clicking on the options icon, here I can choose to change the mode between list and grid, and the thumbnail size between large and small. I typically leave the thumbnail size at small, and the view as grid so I can quickly see all of the resources available to me. Now for the page that we're building, I've used this picnic background.

I can add this to my page simply by double clicking on it. If you're working along with me, please feel free to add any background that you think's appropriate for your students. Now, while I'm in the resource browser, I'm going to go ahead and add the rest of the resources that I'll use throughout this chapter. The next place I'm going to go to is under lesson building tools. I can open it up by clicking on this small arrow on the left hand side. I'm going to go ahead and add a button that we're going to use to turn into a clock toggle so I can turn the clock on and off on my presentation. I'm going to go and keep scrolling down until I see the clock icon.

Double clicking the clock icon will automatically add it to my page. I'm just going to grab the clock icon by clicking and holding and dragging it down to the bottom of the page to position it where I'd like it for the actual presentation. And the last thing we're going to add is the magnifying glass that will eventually change so that we can see through objects. I'm going to go under gadgets, and under gadgets I'll find this magnifying glass. Once again I can double-click it to add it to the page. And then I can go ahead and use things such as the resizing handles, or the rotating handles, to go ahead and make it exactly the shape and position that I'd like it on my particular page.

So now, with just a few clicks of the mouse, we have a page that's already starting to take shape. We've added some resources that we can now add actions to and continue to configure as we continue building our page.