There are a lot of ways to use Three Ring, but the common thread is examining/driving student learning and growth through artifacts themselves. Have students snap pictures, record live events, experiment with capturing exit slips. See more ideas on our blog, in our tutorials, and in the press. [LINKS] We are also creating a community forum where teachers can share ideas, and you can always learn about the latest ways other teachers are using Three Ring by following us on twitter and liking us on Facebook [LINKS].
Three Ring works best with an iPhone, iPad, or Android phone, but if you don’t have one, that’s OK too! You can use your computer to create an account at www.threering.com and upload files.
If you do have a phone or tablet, you can download our App after setting up an account. The iOS App is available here and the Android App is available here.
No, Three Ring works well no matter how many computers your class has access to. So long as you have one smartphone or tablet in the classroom, it’s easy to capture photos and videos using our App. If your students have smartphones or computers
No! If you set up your account from your computer, you can copy and paste all the names in at once from Excel or a CSV file. We are working on options for importing rosters from various programs/file types directly.
We are creating these now. Please contact us [LINK] to ask your question and make suggestions for what information would be helpful to include.
Yes, you can add to or change your rosters under setup/settings once you are logged in at www.threering.com.
Yes.
Three Ring is a hybrid! Our mobile app works with our website as the simplest way for you to upload and access all types of artifacts. Right now, the app is only for capturing pictures, audio, or video of student work/activity. To view or use the artifacts, log in to www.threering.com from any computer or browser and it is all there.
Additionally, you can use the website to upload digital files such as photo files, Word documents, and PDFs. So, to summarize, use the App to capture artifacts directly from the classroom. Use the website to share, comment, assess, and search through the artifacts and portfolios as well as to add digitally created files.
Our App is available on iOS and Android. However, we are mostly concentrating on iOS for the moment and some Android devices do not support the Three Ring app. We’re sorry! Three Ring is perfect for use with your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch as well as most Android devices.
You can access www.threering.com from any computer or mobile device. So remember: Three Ring mobile app for capturing artifacts, www.threering.com to view and use.
Unfortunately, we don’t yet support uploading Word documents, PDFs, or similar files from the iPad at this time. You can upload these files from any computer through www.threering.com. Additionally, it is possible to upload screenshots from your iPad through our app which might help in some cases. For now, please use the iPad (or other mobile version) app to capture pictures, audio, and video of the awesome things your students are doing and use the website from a computer when students need to add digital files to their portfolio.
To see the artifacts you’ve captured, you need to log in at www.threering.com. It might seem strange at first, but we think you will see that it actually works quite well!
Three Ring uses a stream and tags instead of a folder. This allows each artifact to belong to multiple “students” or “tags” at once. To see a single student’s entire work history, simply click on his or her name or type his or her name into the search bar.
Tags are very flexible, but that can be a double-edged sword. Essentially, tags allow you to organize your artifacts however you like. My favorite examples have been teachers who create a tag for each standard, for each project, for each unit, or for each step in a pipeline (i.e., first draft, rough draft, and final draft). You can use different tags for every class.
Practically speaking, it is probably best to limit the number of tags. We encourage you to take a minute, decide how your currculum can best be organized, and add those tags through the “Manage Tags” page in your www.threering.com account. That way, your artifacts will always be well organized and easy to retrieve for a variety of pedagogical purposes.
Try playing around with tags and the search bar. You can search multiple tags, tags with student names, etc. This makes it extremely easy to answer questions like “How did the whole class do the last time we worked on systems of equations?”
We always want to hear from our users. Shoot us an email!! [LINK]
A teacher can use specially generated student codes to allow students to link their www.threering.com accounts to the teacher. The codes are found in the “Manage Students” page.
Teachers can use parent email addresses to invite parents to create www.threering.com accounts. Once the accounts are linked, the teacher can share individual artifacts with the appropriate students in one-click. Soon, we will release student and parent versions of the app allowing artifacts to be submitted by all users.
Teachers can see all artifacts for all of their students and choose which ones to share. Once shared, each student will be able to see just his or her own artifacts and each parent will be able to see artifacts for each of their children. Meanwhile everything is private and secure--no public access to student’s artifacts.
Not just yet. As of right now, students can sign up for a Student Account on www.threering.com where they can view artifacts you (their teacher) have shared with them. However, they are not yet able to upload pictures, video, or other files right now. We are working on this functionality as a top priority.
We are working on several additional sharing options right now. Our values are that the teacher and students should be able to easily get their data (particularly artifacts) out of the system in a variety of ways. Please bear with us as we explore which ways will be most convenient, feasible, and secure. Let us know how you would like to export and share and stay tuned for new options and features.
Currently, there is no limit. We do not anticipate needing to put limits into place. We may eventually ask you to archive old work but, in general, our goal is to make it as easy as possible for teachers and students to save and use artifacts/evidence of learning over time.
Nothing! It takes a few minutes for videos to process. They are immediately available as an attachment for you to open but you may need to wait a few minutes (depending on the length of the video) before you can play it in-stream.
Two things could be the source of the problem. First, we have a limit of about 5 minutes on each individual video, if you attempt to upload a longer video from class, it will fail. Second, your wifi or 3G access may have been disrupted during the upload which caused it to fail. We are working on a cool new feature that fixes this problem and should be released soon.
At the moment, you have to individually save and print each file. We are working on printing, emailing, saving as PDF, and other exporting options. Part of our values is to make it easy for teachers and students to access, use, and control their data.
This doesn’t exist yet but we plan to implement it during the 2012-2013 school year.
Log in at www.threering.com and you will find this all under the Settings menu in the upper right. For the moment, this can only be done through the website and not through the app.
You can also do this by logging in to www.threering.com and navigating to the Settings menu in the upper right. Remember, you need to use tags for each class--adding tags to one class does not add them to any others. You then need to refresh the app before the new/changed tags will sync. The next version of the Three Ring app will allow you to add tags in-app.
At the top right of every post, there is an “edit” button. Clicking on it allows you to change students and tags associated with the post or delete the post.
You can change account settings on www.threering.com under the Settings menu in the upper right.
We are developing administrator accounts. Sign up [LINK] to be receive information about piloting! Administrators will be able to view artifacts from across the school/district as well as summary information through a dashboard.
Get the teachers to start right away with our free version so they can get used to the workflow, create best practices, and make suggestions. Our school-wide Enterprise edition will be ready in the fall semester and you can sign up as an Administrator [LINK] to be first in line to use it!! This version will allow teacher-to-teacher connections, administrative access, as well as complete networking of accounts for all users.
We will offer teacher-to-teacher options as soon as we can - it’s definitely in the works!