A month into the first quarter, Chinquapin’s faculty and students have already been experimenting and learning with the iLife applications and our new laptops. Kathy reports that the ongoing projects are so numerous that the laptops are heavily used during evening study halls. Brian has used the laptops to collect data on sound for analysis in senior Physics. My English II students have created iMovies in response to Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (look for sample “Blessing” movies by Pedro and Rachel in the faculty shared network folder). Carl has used them to teach students to use correct accents and other diacritical marks in Spanish.

I want to remind everyone of the resources available at the Apple Education Community. In a quick recent visit, I discovered video tutorials on podcasting, a page on “tips and tricks” (such as “how to screenshot anything”), and an e-newsletter on using Macs in schools. If you recall, we all signed up as members of this community on the last day of our training. I still have some activation codes and license numbers, if you have forgotten user ID and password or if you weren’t able to attend the training.

Hoping to save you some of the trials my class initially experienced, I have attached in the comments my lengthy instructions for teaching iMovie (though I’m sure there’s probably a better version at the web site above) for our “Blessings” project. The students and I definitely experienced joys and frustrations with this project, but that is all part of learning something new, and it felt good to learn these things together. I included the students in the process, evaluating what was working and what was not working as we went along, encouraging the students who finished early to instruct the students who were having trouble, engaging the class in designing a rubric.

My students learned so many things beyond the basics of the software, I stopped trying to catalog their achievements. Here are a few of their more significant developments: gaining a sense of several elements working together to create an overall aesthetic, weighing word choice carefully to make a powerful statement in few words, fine-tuning that statement for public viewing, and problem-solving in collaboration. Some key to things to focus on if you are planning such a project: have a plan for how you will collect and save their work; be sure that students work directly on their local computers until the end of their projects (we had problems with transmitting work wirelessly), slow students down and constantly remind them to read the instructions.