educators

If you've come to this page, you're probably a journalism instructor who's trying to incorporate Flash into a multimedia design course, or perhaps you're a Flash developer who is trying to teach Flash to journalism students. Either way, your situation is not the same as that of the average Flash trainer who faces a general audience of people who want to learn Flash.

What's different about journalism students? Well, they may have no previous experience with code or scripting of any kind. But more important, the kinds of applications and presentations they need to understand are like the examples shown here -- journalism. This means (to me, anyway) that a lot of the books out there about learning Flash are just not suitable for this audience. They do not teach the things that we need for telling stories with Flash -- such as how to build a scrolling text device, or how to load Soundslides.

In my course, I'm using Adobe Flash Professional CS5 Classroom in a Book. I'm adding a lot of instruction to what's in the book, and you're welcome to download these PDF handouts and use them in your own classes:

• Lesson 1 Notes: Use while working on Lesson 1.
• Enhanced Lesson 1: Use after completing Lesson 1.
• Lesson 2 Notes: Use while working on Lesson 2 and afterward.
• Lesson 4 Notes: Use while working on Lesson 4. IMPORTANT: There are replacement instructions for pp. 107-108 in the book!
• Lesson 6 Notes and Tips: Use while working on Lesson 6.
• Lesson 8 Notes and Tips: Use while working on video section of Lesson 8.

That's all I have so far for this edition of the Adobe Flash CS5 book. I skip Lesson 3 and Lesson 5 because I consider their relevance for journalism applications to be fairly low.

This is the order I follow in teaching Flash to journalism students:

• Week 1: Drawing and simple motion tweens. Timeline. Lessons 1 and 2 in Adobe Flash Professional CS5 Classroom in a Book.
• Week 2: More animation. Lesson 4.
• Week 3: Buttons. Introduction to ActionScript 3.0. Lesson 6.
  This is a foundational, fundamental part of Flash and deserves close attention. To provide story content via Flash, we usually use buttons to allow the users to navigate from one part of the story to another (using frame labels), to show and hide content, to move forward and back in a story, and to replay. For students who have never seen computer programming languages before, this can be a tough step. But it's essential to learn, if you want to tell stories with Flash.
• Week 4: Audio and video in Flash. Lesson 8. Supplemental material for audio.
  Of course it's very common for journalism stories to include audio and video. Flash is a great platform for deploying audio and video content, and all you need to do is master a few blocks of ActionScript. The supplemental material has been tested in CS4 and CS5 and contains all ActionScript 3 controls for external MP3 files. I use sound controls as a vehicle for teaching techniques of writing script. Students learn about variables, if-then statements, and Booleans in the sound controls exercises.
• Week 5: Movie Clip symbols. (Not covered well in the book.) Three exercises for learning about movie clips are presented in this handout (PDF, 108 KB); files can be found in this folder. A commonly seen movie clip in journalism packages is a pop-up information panel such as one that slides out to show project credits or one that appears when you hover over points on a map.
• Week 6: Dynamic text (Lesson 7, with supplemental material). XML and external data (not covered in the book). More ActionScript.
• Week 7: The Loader object and loaded SWFs. Lesson 9.
• Week 8: Optimization. Bandwidth Profiler. Use of SWFObject 2.x. Lesson 10 plus.

The Flash homework I assign is explained in detail here: Required Work. There are four foundation-building assignments and then a project that gives the student creative control.

If you have any questions, I'd be happy to try to answer them.