Friday, May 23, 2003
Fifth Graders Living the iLife, Part 3: which way is the middle school?
Capturing media on a three-day field trip is fun. Working with that media on an iBook on the tour bus is even more so. But collaborating with forty-four fifth graders in the hopes of ending up with a single multimedia project after you've returned home? Now that's a trip in itself. After three days of living the iLife, what we ended up with can only be described as four separate iPhoto projects, expanded into four separate Keynote projects, sandwiched by two iMovie projects, all glued together as a single QuickTime movie. And it was by far the most worthwhile thing I've been involved with in five years on the job. Here's how it all happened:
When we got home, each of the four iBooks used on the trip was full of pictures in iPhoto and had a single Keynote presentation that used some, but not nearly all, of these pictures. The most appropriate way to bulk up the project seemed to be to allow each participating student the opportunity to add one more slide to the Keynote project using one picture from iPhoto. I took the students three at a time. Each student was given ten minutes to create a slide centered around a photo that he or she had something meaningful to say about, with as much assistance from the other two students as he or she wished. The flexibility of the iBooks once again allowed us to work anywhere, be it the courtyard or simply the hallway outside the classroom. This was a brutally short amount of time to give to each student, but it was all that was possible given the experimental circumstances of the project. None of this was supposed to happen with these outgoing fifth graders anyway, so anything I could give them was better than the alternative. At least that's what I told myself each time I had to hurry a student along so that I could get to the next group.
Within a few days, each of our four Keynote projects had been fleshed out enough to tell the story of our trip. Of course, this meant that the story was going to be repeated four times. Well, so much the better. If there are three sides to every story, then there four sides to this one. The last batch of students in each group was allowed to resequence their group's Keynote slide show in chronological order, and pick a single transition that would be used for every slide in the show. I exported all four shows into QuickTime, and for a brief moment I thought I was done. But then the issue of the lone camcorder arose once again. How in the world could I pull the video footage into the equation?
If there was going to be a iMovie component to this project, there was no way possible to involve all forty-four students in it. The hour was growing far too late, and for that matter there wasn't all that much video footage to work with. I asked the teachers to choose four top-notch students who would be responsible for creating a short iMovie that would serve as the introduction to the four merged Keynote shows. I've learned that three is the magic number of students that can successfully work as a team when technology is involved, but this time I went with four because I wanted to include as many students as I possibly could. The four of them chose to collectively speak about the trip and the project as footage from the trip was shown. I showed them how to split clips, extract audio, and line up other clips along with that audio. Ninety minutes later, we had a one-minute iMovie.
They wanted to add a title sequence, so I suggested that they review the remaining footage for something would serve as a backdrop. Of all the things they could have chosen, they insisted on using my footage of the Thunder Mountain ride. I was hesitant, but it turned out to be the pefect idea. The titles dropped in an unscrambled themselves as the roller coaster footage of the ride jerked and bounced around in the background. We were almost done, but we were also almost out of time. The students wanted to add another iMovie sequence to the end of the project so as to turn it into a true "frame story". Far be it from me to prevent them from applying their literary skills to their technology project, but there was only time to film one short take. This would have to come out right the first time, or not at all.
I suggested that they choose something to say together, and then make an exit. Seizing the opportunity to revel in the fact that they are nearly finished with elementary school, they settled on "we're off to middle school, see you later", and then took off running out of camera range. One student thought twice about the direction they had bolted in, and ran back and asked, "which way is the middle school?", in an effort to determine whether they had taken off in the right direction, not realizing that no one watching would know the difference. Fortunately, the camera was still running when he did this, and thus we had the perfect final shot. The students added a fade-out onto the end, and it was time to drop the curtains on perhaps the ultimate hybrid multimedia project.
I now had six separate QuickTime movies, and I realized that I was going to need to use QuickTime Pro to glue them all together. In this case, it was money well spent. We had a complete project that used three vital multimedia applications (iPhoto 2, Keynote, iMovie 3), none of which had existed when the year started. Let it not be said that we don't expose our kids to the very latest in educational technology. All forty-four students participated, and we ended up with a final product that they were proud of. Not a bad deal for the group that was going to miss out on this stuff altogether. I showed it to the faculty, and then at the PTA meeting, and I didn't even need to explain that this was an experimental, last-minute, throw-together experiment. It stood well enough on its own that no explanation was necessary.
In fact, the fourth grade teachers were impressed enough that they asked me to duplicate the whole thing with their students on the upcoming fourth grade trip. While this was never part of the gameplan, it does represent an opportunity to briefly expose some of next year's fifth graders to the multimedia before I sit down with them in the fall and properly teach them how to use it all in a full lab setting. Why not go for it? As if according to plan, I was able to call on my fifth graders one last time before they headed off to middle school: I had the fifth graders teach the fourth graders how to use iPhoto and Keynote. There are so many ways in which that could have gone wrong, but it was a complete success. The fifth graders did a better job of teaching it than I did. Burning the project to forty-four CD-R's s that I can give each one of them a copy won't be easy, but they've more than earned it.
Oh, and the teacher who learned Keynote on the bus from one of the students? A week later, that teacher used Keynote to create a presentation for the entire faculty. What can I say? When things are good around here, they're astonishingly good. Before heading out for the weekend, I watched the complete "Fifth Graders Living the iLife" project one more time. I realized that the students who had filmed the introduction had done so in front of a stack of unopened eMac boxes in the corner of the computer lab, and these boxes were rather prominent in the footage. While I never would have allowed this to happen intentionally, it was rather fitting that the Apple logo made its way into our project after all. Without Apple and its amazing products, most of this project would simply not have been possible. I could go into so much greater detail on that last subject, but it's late and I've got another field trip to go on in the morning.
Need more info so you can try this out yourself? Have your own iLife education experiences to share? Suggestions on how I can pull the whole thing off more skillfully next time? Feel free to school me.
Oh, and by the way, anyone interested in scoring their very own "Macintosh users, you've never had it so good" T-shirt can now do so by clicking here.
Capturing media on a three-day field trip is fun. Working with that media on an iBook on the tour bus is even more so. But collaborating with forty-four fifth graders in the hopes of ending up with a single multimedia project after you've returned home? Now that's a trip in itself. After three days of living the iLife, what we ended up with can only be described as four separate iPhoto projects, expanded into four separate Keynote projects, sandwiched by two iMovie projects, all glued together as a single QuickTime movie. And it was by far the most worthwhile thing I've been involved with in five years on the job. Here's how it all happened:
When we got home, each of the four iBooks used on the trip was full of pictures in iPhoto and had a single Keynote presentation that used some, but not nearly all, of these pictures. The most appropriate way to bulk up the project seemed to be to allow each participating student the opportunity to add one more slide to the Keynote project using one picture from iPhoto. I took the students three at a time. Each student was given ten minutes to create a slide centered around a photo that he or she had something meaningful to say about, with as much assistance from the other two students as he or she wished. The flexibility of the iBooks once again allowed us to work anywhere, be it the courtyard or simply the hallway outside the classroom. This was a brutally short amount of time to give to each student, but it was all that was possible given the experimental circumstances of the project. None of this was supposed to happen with these outgoing fifth graders anyway, so anything I could give them was better than the alternative. At least that's what I told myself each time I had to hurry a student along so that I could get to the next group.
Within a few days, each of our four Keynote projects had been fleshed out enough to tell the story of our trip. Of course, this meant that the story was going to be repeated four times. Well, so much the better. If there are three sides to every story, then there four sides to this one. The last batch of students in each group was allowed to resequence their group's Keynote slide show in chronological order, and pick a single transition that would be used for every slide in the show. I exported all four shows into QuickTime, and for a brief moment I thought I was done. But then the issue of the lone camcorder arose once again. How in the world could I pull the video footage into the equation?
If there was going to be a iMovie component to this project, there was no way possible to involve all forty-four students in it. The hour was growing far too late, and for that matter there wasn't all that much video footage to work with. I asked the teachers to choose four top-notch students who would be responsible for creating a short iMovie that would serve as the introduction to the four merged Keynote shows. I've learned that three is the magic number of students that can successfully work as a team when technology is involved, but this time I went with four because I wanted to include as many students as I possibly could. The four of them chose to collectively speak about the trip and the project as footage from the trip was shown. I showed them how to split clips, extract audio, and line up other clips along with that audio. Ninety minutes later, we had a one-minute iMovie.
They wanted to add a title sequence, so I suggested that they review the remaining footage for something would serve as a backdrop. Of all the things they could have chosen, they insisted on using my footage of the Thunder Mountain ride. I was hesitant, but it turned out to be the pefect idea. The titles dropped in an unscrambled themselves as the roller coaster footage of the ride jerked and bounced around in the background. We were almost done, but we were also almost out of time. The students wanted to add another iMovie sequence to the end of the project so as to turn it into a true "frame story". Far be it from me to prevent them from applying their literary skills to their technology project, but there was only time to film one short take. This would have to come out right the first time, or not at all.
I suggested that they choose something to say together, and then make an exit. Seizing the opportunity to revel in the fact that they are nearly finished with elementary school, they settled on "we're off to middle school, see you later", and then took off running out of camera range. One student thought twice about the direction they had bolted in, and ran back and asked, "which way is the middle school?", in an effort to determine whether they had taken off in the right direction, not realizing that no one watching would know the difference. Fortunately, the camera was still running when he did this, and thus we had the perfect final shot. The students added a fade-out onto the end, and it was time to drop the curtains on perhaps the ultimate hybrid multimedia project.
I now had six separate QuickTime movies, and I realized that I was going to need to use QuickTime Pro to glue them all together. In this case, it was money well spent. We had a complete project that used three vital multimedia applications (iPhoto 2, Keynote, iMovie 3), none of which had existed when the year started. Let it not be said that we don't expose our kids to the very latest in educational technology. All forty-four students participated, and we ended up with a final product that they were proud of. Not a bad deal for the group that was going to miss out on this stuff altogether. I showed it to the faculty, and then at the PTA meeting, and I didn't even need to explain that this was an experimental, last-minute, throw-together experiment. It stood well enough on its own that no explanation was necessary.
In fact, the fourth grade teachers were impressed enough that they asked me to duplicate the whole thing with their students on the upcoming fourth grade trip. While this was never part of the gameplan, it does represent an opportunity to briefly expose some of next year's fifth graders to the multimedia before I sit down with them in the fall and properly teach them how to use it all in a full lab setting. Why not go for it? As if according to plan, I was able to call on my fifth graders one last time before they headed off to middle school: I had the fifth graders teach the fourth graders how to use iPhoto and Keynote. There are so many ways in which that could have gone wrong, but it was a complete success. The fifth graders did a better job of teaching it than I did. Burning the project to forty-four CD-R's s that I can give each one of them a copy won't be easy, but they've more than earned it.
Oh, and the teacher who learned Keynote on the bus from one of the students? A week later, that teacher used Keynote to create a presentation for the entire faculty. What can I say? When things are good around here, they're astonishingly good. Before heading out for the weekend, I watched the complete "Fifth Graders Living the iLife" project one more time. I realized that the students who had filmed the introduction had done so in front of a stack of unopened eMac boxes in the corner of the computer lab, and these boxes were rather prominent in the footage. While I never would have allowed this to happen intentionally, it was rather fitting that the Apple logo made its way into our project after all. Without Apple and its amazing products, most of this project would simply not have been possible. I could go into so much greater detail on that last subject, but it's late and I've got another field trip to go on in the morning.
Need more info so you can try this out yourself? Have your own iLife education experiences to share? Suggestions on how I can pull the whole thing off more skillfully next time? Feel free to school me.
Oh, and by the way, anyone interested in scoring their very own "Macintosh users, you've never had it so good" T-shirt can now do so by clicking here.
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