Saturday, May 10, 2003
Fifth Graders Living the iLife: the great experiment begins
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 opportunitues 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 ten 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 on 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 ragarding 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 to 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 unneccessarily 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 shortly, follwed later by Part Three, which will cover the creation of the final product, its ramifications, and thoughts on how the whole experiment will impact the future of our technology program. 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. If you're an educator, I'd love to hear from you.
For regular readers, I'd like to state for the record that "I'm back", and a return to new content on a daily basis is in order. I'll also share that during the course of writing this column, I purchased four more songs from the iTunes Music Store. This could certainly become habit-forming. Hey, adults deserve to life the iLife as well.
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 opportunitues 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 ten 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 on 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 ragarding 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 to 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 unneccessarily 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 shortly, follwed later by Part Three, which will cover the creation of the final product, its ramifications, and thoughts on how the whole experiment will impact the future of our technology program. 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. If you're an educator, I'd love to hear from you.
For regular readers, I'd like to state for the record that "I'm back", and a return to new content on a daily basis is in order. I'll also share that during the course of writing this column, I purchased four more songs from the iTunes Music Store. This could certainly become habit-forming. Hey, adults deserve to life the iLife as well.
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