As the end
of the school year draws near and schools begin taking
their end-of-the-year field trips, it
seems an appropriate time to once again share the story of
what happened back in May 2003 when, two days before embarking
on our big fifth grade trip, I decided I was going to teach
all of the participating students how to use iPhoto and Keynote...and
then proceeded to take iBooks and digital cameras
on the bus with us, resulting in a multi-faceted project that
I consider to be the highlight of my five year tenure at the
school. Although I've since moved on from working at the school
to managing my stable of websites full-time, I believe that
the "Fifth Graders Living the iLife" story is as relevant today
as it was a year ago, and it's my hope that by sharing it now,
educators out there might be inspired to take on such an endeavor
with their own students.
And if you're
wondering, yes I really can step into your school as a free
agent consultant and set things in motion such that your school
can soon be living the iLife as well, but the truth is that
it's not that difficult for you to make things happen on your
own, provided that you're bold enough to try things that no
one around you has ever done before. Don't be afraid to take
a cue from Apple's innovative spirit, and do a little local
innovating yourself. If you're doing it in the name of benefiting
the kids' education, then you'll have nothing to worry about.
This story
is told in three parts, with parts two and three appearing
over the weekend, and at the end of part three, there will
actually be a link to where you can watch the final project
yourself. Feel free to contact
me if you have any questions or if you're
looking for advice on how to make something like this a reality
in your own school. But in any case, without further ado, I
present to you "Part one: the
Great Experiment Begins." Hope you enjoy it:
Fifth
Graders Living the iLife: the great experiment begins
[originally
posted to billpalmer.net on May 10th, 2003]
When you're
implementing a long-term plan for building the technology program
at an elementary school, it's inevitable that some of your
students will move on before you can get your program where
you really want it to be. You can't help but feel disappointed
that you couldn't do more for these students before they
moved up to middle school. But as your program continues to
grow and improve, you feel a bit better each year about the
opportunities that you've provided for your outgoing fifth
graders. This year's outbound crop not only learned how to
take advantage of Internet research using everything from search
engines to online encyclopedias and atlases, they also learned
how to organize and present their research using the AppleWorks
Presentation module. While our program has certainly grown
by leaps and bounds in a relatively short period of time, it
wasn't going to be until next year that we were really going
hit paydirt with the students. We've recently acquired enough
digital devices to allow students to participate in iLife projects
rather than just watch them, enough Keynote licenses to provide
students with a better presentation vehicle, and a cart full
of wireless MacOS X-enabled iBooks to make it all a reality
within the classroom.
But that's all for next year's students. From what I gather,
we provided our fifth graders this year with more educational
technology opportunities than most other schools do. As the year
wound down, I felt like I had done right by these kids. However,
in the past few weeks, some of next year's equipment started
showing up early, and I began searching for some way to expose
our outgoing students to the new stuff, if only briefly, before
they left us. When I was tapped to go along on a multi-day field
trip that involved many of these students, I knew that the opportunity
I was looking for had arrived. These fifth graders were going
to live the iLife after all.
Not all of
the equipment arrived in time for the trip. We had the digital
cameras, but not the camcorders. We had the Keynote licenses,
but not the student iBooks. We did have four new iBooks that
were earmarked for faculty expansion next year. Working with
what we had, we decided that each group of eleven students
on the trip would have one digital camera and one iBook --
far from ideal, but far better than nothing. They would take
turns taking pictures at each event on the trip. During bus
rides in between destinations, they would take turns uploading
the pictures, editing them in iPhoto 2, and moving them into
Keynote so that they could collectively create a presentation
that would tell the story of their trip. Whatever portion of
their presentation didn't get finished on the trip itself would
be completed during the next school week. There was, however,
one little problem: most of the students had never used any
of the hardware or software involved. If we were going to make
this happen, I was going to have to teach all of them how to
use everything in a period of only two days.
I've taught
new technology to students many times, but never under these
time constraints, so a bit of improvisation was in order. When
you've got the flexibility of laptops, any open space can become
a classroom. I took the students out to the courtyard a dozen
at a time, put them into four groups of three, gave each group
a camera, and taught them the basics of digital photography.
I then allowed them to take photos of whatever they wished (mostly
of each other, more on that issue later). Once they had accumulated
enough photos to work with, I gave each group an iBook and taught
them how to upload those photos into iPhoto 2. Each student took
turns editing the photos that he or she had taken, using the
Crop, Enhance, Red-eye, and Brightness/Contrast tools. Like champs,
the kids essentially taught these skills to themselves and to
each other, as I rotated among groups and answered questions.
With one click of the Play button, they were watching slide shows
of their photos. If the group had been having difficulty up to
this point, I would have stopped here and left Keynote out of
the equation entirely. But they were so into their element with
this technology that when I asked them if they wanted to stop
or learn more new stuff, I don't even need to tell you their
unanimous answer.
If a picture
is worth a thousand words, Keynote allows you to use both that
picture and those words gracefully. As I began to teach the
students the basics of Keynote through their creation of a
mock project called "Our Trip to the Courtyard",
one of my long-standing theories regarding educational technology
was put to the test. I've believed that if young students use
simple, well-designed technology tools as part of their education,
they'll have no trouble migrating to more complicated versions
of those tools later on. This turned out to be true. The speed
at which the students mastered Keynote was obviously due to the
fact that they had been using AppleWorks Presentation module
all year. They easily related the features between the program
they knew and the one they were learning. The expanded feature
set and increased number of options didn't phase them a bit.
This is equally a testament to just how intuitive Keynote really
is, and the capacity of ten year olds to learn how to use nearly
any technology you can throw at them.
In a period of one hour, the students had learned how to use
iPhoto 2, Keynote, the digital camera, and the iBook. The fact
that they had been using MacOS X in their classrooms all year
helped when it came to working with two applications simultaneously
(dragging photos from iPhoto to Keynote). They certainly mastered
this potentially tricky concept more quickly than most adults
seem to. In fact, they learned everything almost disturbingly
fast. I think they spent more time adjusting to the laptop trackpads
than anything else, and after a short time, they even had the
hang of that. I later took the other trip attendees in equal-size
groups and had equal-sized success with them. The training was
a little rough around the edges due to the time constraints.
Flashy tools such as iPhoto's Retouch brush and Keynote's opacity
slider were left out. But the students were enthused and seemed
genuinely excited at the prospect of putting their new-found
skills to good use on their upcoming trip.
Once I had
finished with every student, I took a moment to reflect on
the fact that not one bit of this would have been possible
if our school was saddled with Windows PC's. Instead of Keynote,
we would have needed to use PowerPoint, which in comparison is
so unnecessarily overcomplicated that the students would have
lost most of their time trying to locate the basic features.
Instead of iPhoto 2, what tool would we have used if we were
stuck in a Windows world? Probably nothing at all. In those two
days, I saw so much opportunity for the students that could only
be accomplished on the Macintosh platform, that any administrator
or decision-maker still trying to push Windows PC's into schools
should be rounded up and tossed into jail for their crimes. It's
one thing if schools simply don't have the funding to invest
in new technology at all. But schools purposely purchasing hopelessly
outclassed and comparatively functionless Windows computers for
schools, when they could be purchasing Macs? No one has the right
to deprive students of that big of a chunk of their education.
It's difficult enough to provide students with bleeding-edge
technology as part of their education as it is, but being crippled
by Windows crap would make it impossible. I give thanks every
day that my school is 100% Macintosh, and if yours is, so should
you. If yours isn't, and you're the technology person, then your
primary focus must be on correcting the situation -- everything
that follows depends on it.
But I digress. When you're on the verge of major success, thoughts
of how it all could have gone wrong (in this case, with PC's)
tend to haunt you, but there was nothing to worry about here.
The day before the trip, all the equipment was ready to go, and
I couldn't wait to see how it was all going to turn out. The
other educators taking part in the trip agreed to assist in implementing
the technology, which mainly focused on making sure the equipment
was shared properly. Things rarely go according to plan the first
time you try something new in actual practice, and I knew that
various adjustments to the gameplan would probably be necessary
as the days went on. Moreover, I was determined not to let the
technology presence interfere with the students' ability to enjoy
their trip. If they decided that they didn't want to spend time
taking pictures, or if they chose to use their bus time socializing
instead of hunkering over a laptop, that was going to be their
choice. This was all going to happen naturally or it wasn't going
to happen at all. But something told me that the students were
going to take to this project like a web junkie takes to a new
Safari beta.
My one regret going into this was that without camcorders, iMovie
wouldn't be a part of the plan. The biggest payoff in the educational
technology arena was once again going to elude us. Then, almost
as if by magic, a digital camcorder dropped into my lap just
a few hours before we would depart on our field trip. Not planning
on this, I hadn't made any attempt to teach the students how
to use iMovie or even how to use a camcorder. If I took the camcorder
with us, it would mean that this experiment was going to be even
more of a big, awkward leap forward than I had originally thought.
Reminding myself that this was going to be our last chance with
this particular batch of students, I brought the camcorder on
the bus along with the rest of the equipment. Glancing at the
students as they excitedly took their seats on the bus, I reminded
myself that they didn't know how to use any of this stuff a week
ago. As we pulled out, I crossed my fingers and hoped that these
students' three days of living the iLife would be three days
for them to remember.
Part Two
of "Fifth Graders Living the iLife",
describing how the three days went, will appear here Sunday,
followed by Part Three next week, which will cover the creation
of the final product, and its ramifications. It will include
how things played out, what went according to plan, what we
never could have predicted, and just how many smiles we managed
to put on just how many faces. I'll provide enough detail so
that any educators who wish to implement something similar
on their next extended field trip will be able to use our experiences
as a starting point. See you in Part Two.
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