A Tantalizing Tabblo
Over the past three semesters, my education undergraduate students have been working with Panraven, a compelling and interesting web site that allows users to create, publish, and even print online storybooks. We have used Panraven to create sense-of-place projects with an eye toward using Panraven as a K-12 classroom tool. My students’ reactions to using Panraven–expressed personally and through their blogs–have been remarkably similar. While they love the final product–a nicely-formatted online storybook–they consistently struggle with Panraven’s many frustrating limitations and apparent beta bugs. Among those:
- Upload of images is frustratingly slow and often hangs in progress, requiring a browser restart and loss of work;
- Dragging images from the media folder to a project sometimes simply doesn’t work at all, again requiring a restart;
- Text boxes cannot be resized to accommodate more (or less) text than will fit in a given box;
- Images are fixed and cannot be moved around on a page to facilitate creative layouts;
- Viewing storybooks online seems inordinately slow, even on a fast campus-wide network.
For these reasons, most of my students reluctantly conclude that Panraven is not a reliable classroom tool, particularly for younger elementary students. The final product, while very compelling, is not worth the potential frustration of using the tool in a K-12 setting.
That’s why I was thrilled to be directed by a colleague to Tabblo (pronounce it “tableau”). Like Panraven, Tabblo creates online storybooks. (It also creates comic books and posters up to 24″ x 36″, but that’s another blog entry.) Unlike Panraven, however, uploading images is very fast. In fact, in my side by side tests on the same computer using the same network, Tabblo uploaded images many times faster than Panraven. Tabblo never hesitated to upload properly, and dragging photos into a story within Tabblo worked perfectly each time I tried it.
Viewing storybooks online is also much faster than with Panraven. Turning a page in Tabblo produces a pleasing”page curl” effect (which works forwards or backwards at both the top and bottom corners of a page) and there is no noticeable delay in loading the next page as there is with Panraven. On the other hand, Tabblo stories appear much smaller on a web page than do Panraven stories (which give you the option of enlarging the display if you want), making captions or small text difficult to read. If there is a way to enlarge Tabblo books, I have not found it yet.
Creating layouts in Tabblo is a breeze, and, while you can choose from a variety of preset layouts, the author is afforded complete control over the placement of images and text boxes on any page. Pictures can be moved from one place to another on a page or dragged off the page and stored in a virtual lightbox for use later. Text boxes can be any size and can be resized easily. It’s simple to insert new pages or delete unwanted pages. And–these actions happen quickly, with no discernible delay in execution.
Tabblo doesn’t win in every category, however. Panraven allows you to embed your stories into a blog, wiki, or other web page. I like this feature very much. Tabblo generates code that “simulates” embedding (that is, it places an image of the storybook cover in your blog), but that image is in reality just a link to the Tabblo web site. It would be wonderful if Tabblo allowed true embedding of projects into web pages.
Below is a test story that I created with Tabblo. Notice that the captions are difficult to read. I cannot find a way to increase the text size in the captions.
Even so, it looks like I am going to have to change my fall semester syllabus. We’re moving to Tabblo as an alternative to Panraven.
CoSN Investigates Scandanavian Students’ Success
An interesting follow up to my Feb 29 post (What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?) showed up today from eSchool News. The article, U.S. Educators Seek Lessons from Scandinavia, reported on a visit to Scandinavian schools by the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN). The purpose of the visit was to find “answers for how students in that region of the world were able to score so high on a recent international test of math and science skills.”
CoSN’s observations speak volumes about the current state of US public schools. In Scandinavian schools, students begin formal education at 7 years, having spent the previous several years in preschool programs aimed at personal responsibility and social development rather than on academics. By the time they get to formal schooling, the situation looks like this:
[CoSN] found that educators in Finland, Sweden, and Denmark all cited autonomy, project-based learning, and nationwide broadband internet access as keys to their success… Grading doesn’t happen until the high-school level, because they believe grading takes the fun out of learning. They want to inspire continuous learning.
What the CoSN delegation didn’t find in those nations were competitive grading, standardized testing, and top-down accountability—all staples of the American education system.
The Scandinavians have apparently learned that drilling young children on facts and figures to produce better scores on standardized tests does not produce well-educated adults. Similarly, they seem to have figured out that guiding students into taking more responsibility for their own learning means that the students…ummm…learn more. And learning can be fun? Why is this surprising?
Could we design a system of public education that was any more backwards? If you need more evidence, visit the Orlando Sentinel.
What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?
That’s not my title. It’s from this article in the Wall Street Journal. Read it right now. There is much food for thought here. Not mentioned in the article is the fact that Finland is the most wired country in the world with very high bandwidth Internet access available in every home. (If you thought Nokia was a Japanese company, you’re wrong. It’s Finnish.)
