Classroom III

This past week, I have been exploring the new and or enhanced features for teaching included in Apple’s latest operating system upgrade- Leopard. In this post, I attempt to hash-out my thoughts on the new features that I am still shaking my head over. My only complaint about Leopard for educators and students is the price. $13 is about 10% off retail. Hello!!! Apple- you are killing me here. (I know bootleg copies are against the law, so I am not going to say anything else)

I opted to upgrade instead of a clean install. Brad Stocks, our network engineer for our school system recommended a clean install like he had done on his MacBook Pro. The process took a few hours, but I just started the installation and taught my classes. I walked by every time I had a chance and looked for error messages. When no error messages appeared I was happy as a kid at Christmas. Now, I read the first paragraph in the READ ME doc, and threw it in the trash can. Reading those documents just makes you sit in front of the screen and ring your hands like a mad man. I am from the just do it camp and if the install fails, then read the manual. However, I had made a complete backup of the hard drive onto an external drive.

Installation was too easy. When I tried to run iMovie ‘08, it crashed, iPhoto did not work very well but an Apple update fixed something and by Thursday afternoon, iLife apps worked without crashing. My point here is to say some issues seem to have been addressed by Apple very fast.

Now, which Leopard apps have I tried in the first week of use?

• Mail: Well, I do not make it a practice to send email to students, however, I love the enhanced mail features that includes integration with my calendars. As chairman of our School Improvement Team, I have to schedule meetings for our staff. This week, we had a meeting planned for Friday morning. My principal got a call after the teachers left school Thursday about the meeting scheduled for 8:30 a.m. on Friday. She could have emailed me and I could have updated the calendar but she forgot to tell us. That is ok, when the teachers showed up for the meeting, they all rolled their eyes at me because I had emailed them from iCal and had invited them to attend. This upgrade works, but Google Calendar is still far ahead of iCal and Apple Mail. My daughter uses Outlook in her job- Apple Mail is a joke to her. However, for teachers, the features are more than most of us need. The most impressive tool in Mail is the built-in RSS reader. I have added several key RSS feeds that I read daily. For example, I enjoy the NY Times - Education feed. I have added an RSS feed from educators using Twitter.
• iChat: I had been testing the use of CamTwist with my students a couple of weeks ago as we explored video casting. I setup a Ustream.TV streaming video account and thought about using them to webcast student presentations. We had talked about trying to find another classroom to share our videos with. This is still something I am considering. The new iChat is really easy to use with students. Today, after my students completed their required “standard curriculum work”, we fired up iChat on a couple of computers in the classroom and launched Bonjour to share what they have been working on as a review. There is a photo from this activity.

I need to take the time to create a how-to video. However, teachers that have iChat in their classroom probably have the technology skills set to run this activity without my help. The trick is to have a firm idea of exactly why you are doing it not how. I used this activity for a motivational activity at the end of a grueling week of them learning about genotypes, phenotype, recessive, dominate, exons, alleles, and biology topics that had them ready to run away from home. Even high school students like fun activities. Reviewing what they have been talking about or reflecting is a great way to end a topic. iChat is a hit and we will be using it on our classroom intranet. It is safe and fun. The record ichat feature is a killer app for classrooms. The photo above is just part of the activity. Students can include images of themselves in their PowerPoint/Keynote projects, or slideshows online or on their wiki or blogs. I want to publish the movies they will be creating on TeacherTube or Google Video so they can include the clips in their work. The movie integrate with PowerPoint and Keynote to really enhance the content. The animated backgrounds are really impressive. Another wonderful use of iChat is how it supports conferencing. I attended a symposium in Chapel Hill a couple of weeks ago and one of the sessions was about how to use the $1o,ooo dollar industry grade camera to connect classes.

• Spaces: This part of Leopard is a winner in my book. Why? In my classroom, I am busy moving from student to student helping them with their learning projects as they work with their peers to master the topics we are studying and monitoring their progress and behavior. I have been very lucky so far this semester to have a group of self motivated high school students they actually love learning. I am challenged to keep up with their progress. I use Spaces on my desktop PowerPC, yup, my 2.5 GHz Dual Processor G5 with 2.5 GB RAM runs Leopard faster than Tiger. I am excited about this! Spaces helps me organize my work flow so I can spend more time with the students. We use Moodle in the classroom. Moodle’s learning management system helps me communicate student progress in that I have the students take quizzes, create HotPotato quizzes of key science terms, and contribute to a wiki page about biology topics we study. One of my Spaces is our Moodle page. I keep another Space with Mail running. The other two include the iPhoto and GarageBand or iChat.
• Front Row: When I hook my computer up to the digital projector, and use this for students to share their projects and conduct oral reports.
• Create Your Own Educational Apps: After reading the article on Wired by Leander Kahney I am going to take some time to read up on  this and try to find time to build something to use with my students. Hum, teach them to use it and see what they come up with.
• It is my goal to upgrade my iBooks with one MacBook per year until I can replace them all with the newer laptops.