Intellitools Classroom Suite® is such a powerful application that you may wonder how you’ll ever learn all that it can do. The answer is, you can’t–but you really don’t need to learn everything to be a power user. One of the best ways to learn is to be a detective and dig into a finished activity that has a function you want to use to find out how it works. This workshop will equip you with the strategies you need to be an efficient detective. Bonus: A handout with 8 strategies!

The Tides Pools activity set includes so much material that I have broken it into two separate study units. The first unit, Tide Pools, includes Exploring Tide Pools and two supporting books. Exploring Tide Pools is set up so that students can wander through in any order, finding exciting discoveries along the way. The second unit, Tide Pools Writing And Review, includes the tests and three writing activities. Bonus: Vocabulary Cards and a Photo Collection!

Annie’s Books Online is a section of Annie’s Resource Attic which has the main and anchor books from the various activity sets in HTML format. You can see all the action in these books online by going to them from your browser, just as you would go to any other web page. This page will serve as an index to all the online activity sets and you’ll find some tips below about what’s required to use these books successfully with whichever browser you are using.

Just in time for Halloween, this fun activity lets students create digital jack-o’-lanterns. In all, nine different faces are possible. The artwork is very three dimensional and realistic. Once a jack-o’-lantern is finished, students add a lighted candle, and finally gets to see what their creation will look like on Halloween night. Bonuses: Zip files of both the art and creepy sounds!

This resource is a contribution from Karen Schweitzer, a freelance writer and copy editor who is the Business School Guide for About.com. 15 Slide Show Tools for Teachers is an article that links to a selection of useful (and free) sites that can be used to create, present, and publish slide shows. Bonus: Links to three more sites with free resources!

I’ve begun to create activities in HyperStudio 5® and find much to like about this new version of an old and beloved multimedia application. The biggest difference I saw right away is a modernized interface, making it much faster and easier to build activities. Bonus: Links to download players for both new and old version stacks!

Experimenting with what HyperStudio 5® can do is an integral part of using it. Saving often is the best plan, but when you’re having fun creating, you hate to break the flow of ideas. Roger Wagner gave me a quick tip on how to make a quick backup while you are working in HS5 on Mac. Bonus: A link to Roger’s Facebook page!

There is a wonderful timesaver hiding in the Edit menu of HyperStudio 5®. It’s the Group Card option under Ready Made Cards.
Image©2009 ABS Screen shot of HS5 Edit and Ready Made Cards menus showing Group Card option
Once you understand how Group Cards work and how to create them, you can make a stack much faster, come out with a much smaller file, have the layout on each card automatically match, and have a way to change settings in objects on all the cards in the stack at once. Bonus: PDF Quick Guide!

This Classroom Suite® activity has a new frame animation, a spinning boomerang, to use in creating IntelliMation® in your activities. It also explains how to save the boomerang button into your User Library so that you can grab the boomerang from the Picture Library whenever you need it.

Multi-Choice Test Templates includes Microsoft Word®, Clicker 5® and Classroom Suite® versions of templates I have developed to create the tests that become part of the activity sets here in the Attic. They are the result of much trial and error, and in their present form, they save me a great deal of time. So it’s time to make them available to you as well