Tuesday, May 27, 2003
If Apple's rotting, then I hope it keeps up the pace
It's five months into the calendar year, and already I've read no less than five articles referring to Apple as "rotting", "rotten to the core", or some other poorly-executed pun. While these articles are often written out of cluelessness, sometimes out of denial, and occasionally raise one or two good points in among all the doom and gloom, it's hard to imagine a more difficult five-month stretch to be an Apple basher. This year, Apple's innovations seem to be rolling off the assembly line in the order of about one per week. So in case anyone is on the verge of giving in to the alternate-reality that the perennial Apple-bashers seem to live in, here's a recap of just some of what Apple has managed to pull off so far in 2003:
Keynote: This software can already do so many things so effortlessly at version 1.0 that PowerPoint still can't pull off at version 10.0. It's so easy that a fifth grader can master it in a few hours, yet so powerful that the CEO of a Fortune 500 company can use it to present to an audience of thousands.
AirPort 802.11g: Apple practically invented wireless Internet, so it only makes sense that Apple would be the first to bring the next-generation wireless spec to market. I was lucky enough to be there in July 1999 when Steve Jobs passed the original iBook through a hula-hoop without breaking its Internet connection, and in the four years that have passed, I've seen first-hand how this amazing technology can change the both the home and the workplace. Other companies can run all the commercials they want; it doesn't change the fact that Apple leads the industry in the wireless game by years. And now with 802.11g, the gap has widened even more.
12-inch and 17-inch PowerBooks: It was no surprise that Apple was the first to bring a 17-inch laptop to market, but keeping it an inch thick and throwing in a glow-in-the-dark keyboard made it seem as if Apple was just rubbing its competitors' noses in the dirt. But the ultimate insult had to be the 12-inch PowerBook, Apple's first foray in the direction of the thin-and-light notebook. The only thing Apple failed to build into this tiny beauty was waterproofing sufficient to protect against the gallons of drool that have poured its direction.
Safari beta: I don't think you can show up your opponents any more stunningly than to release an unfinished product that kicks the crap out of every established competitor. Innovations like SnapBack, the new bookmarking system, built-in ad blocking, integrated Google search, and tabbed browsing aren't nearly as important as the speed. Not content to rest on its lead in the browser wars (how impossible would that have sounded a year ago?), Apple has released no less than five versions of Safari beta this year, each significantly better than the last.
iLife: Apple already had a lead a mile long in the digital photography, digital video, and DVD creation categories, which meant only one thing: it was time to increase the lead. iPhoto 2, iMovie 3, and iDVD 3 can combine to bring any multimedia-inclined PC user to tears. iPhoto 2 in particular is so stunningly simple and powerful that a fifth grader who has just learned how to use it can turn around and teach a group of fourth graders how to use it.
the $799 eMac: In one sense, this might be the biggest innovation of all. Now, even those on a tight budget can own a G4-based Mac with a 17-inch monitor and a slew of software for under eight hundred dollars. Remember the days when Macs used to cost more than comparably-equipped PC's? You've got to love the irony.
iTunes Music Store: In one day, Apple did more to bring the music industry into the digital era than all the established players in that industry could accomplish, combined, in the decade prior. Nevermind the fact that Apple is a computer company, not a record company! You kind of get the feeling that Apple could step into the fishing rod industry tomorrow and turn that world on its ear just as easily.
I'm sure I've left some important things off the list. The past five months have been so fast-paced in the Macintosh universe that you need a Palm handheld just to keep up (hey, Apple, how about innovating that industry while you're at it?). The amazing part is that there are still seven months left in 2003. We know that MacOS X Panther is just around the corner. There are rumors that new G5 PowerMacs with the fabled PPC 970 processors are coming sooner than later. Apple has promised to bring the iTunes Music Store to long-suffering Windows users this year. And beyond that, who knows what else Apple secretly has waiting on the horizon? Go back and read the above list again, and ask yourself if you could have predicted any of it back on January 1st, 2003.
When it comes to all things Apple, I'm psyched about the last seven months of 2003. If you're not, you're crazy. I hope that the detractors go right on writing their "Apple is rotten to the core" diatribes -- we all need a good laugh now and then. Your comments are welcome.
It's five months into the calendar year, and already I've read no less than five articles referring to Apple as "rotting", "rotten to the core", or some other poorly-executed pun. While these articles are often written out of cluelessness, sometimes out of denial, and occasionally raise one or two good points in among all the doom and gloom, it's hard to imagine a more difficult five-month stretch to be an Apple basher. This year, Apple's innovations seem to be rolling off the assembly line in the order of about one per week. So in case anyone is on the verge of giving in to the alternate-reality that the perennial Apple-bashers seem to live in, here's a recap of just some of what Apple has managed to pull off so far in 2003:
Keynote: This software can already do so many things so effortlessly at version 1.0 that PowerPoint still can't pull off at version 10.0. It's so easy that a fifth grader can master it in a few hours, yet so powerful that the CEO of a Fortune 500 company can use it to present to an audience of thousands.
AirPort 802.11g: Apple practically invented wireless Internet, so it only makes sense that Apple would be the first to bring the next-generation wireless spec to market. I was lucky enough to be there in July 1999 when Steve Jobs passed the original iBook through a hula-hoop without breaking its Internet connection, and in the four years that have passed, I've seen first-hand how this amazing technology can change the both the home and the workplace. Other companies can run all the commercials they want; it doesn't change the fact that Apple leads the industry in the wireless game by years. And now with 802.11g, the gap has widened even more.
12-inch and 17-inch PowerBooks: It was no surprise that Apple was the first to bring a 17-inch laptop to market, but keeping it an inch thick and throwing in a glow-in-the-dark keyboard made it seem as if Apple was just rubbing its competitors' noses in the dirt. But the ultimate insult had to be the 12-inch PowerBook, Apple's first foray in the direction of the thin-and-light notebook. The only thing Apple failed to build into this tiny beauty was waterproofing sufficient to protect against the gallons of drool that have poured its direction.
Safari beta: I don't think you can show up your opponents any more stunningly than to release an unfinished product that kicks the crap out of every established competitor. Innovations like SnapBack, the new bookmarking system, built-in ad blocking, integrated Google search, and tabbed browsing aren't nearly as important as the speed. Not content to rest on its lead in the browser wars (how impossible would that have sounded a year ago?), Apple has released no less than five versions of Safari beta this year, each significantly better than the last.
iLife: Apple already had a lead a mile long in the digital photography, digital video, and DVD creation categories, which meant only one thing: it was time to increase the lead. iPhoto 2, iMovie 3, and iDVD 3 can combine to bring any multimedia-inclined PC user to tears. iPhoto 2 in particular is so stunningly simple and powerful that a fifth grader who has just learned how to use it can turn around and teach a group of fourth graders how to use it.
the $799 eMac: In one sense, this might be the biggest innovation of all. Now, even those on a tight budget can own a G4-based Mac with a 17-inch monitor and a slew of software for under eight hundred dollars. Remember the days when Macs used to cost more than comparably-equipped PC's? You've got to love the irony.
iTunes Music Store: In one day, Apple did more to bring the music industry into the digital era than all the established players in that industry could accomplish, combined, in the decade prior. Nevermind the fact that Apple is a computer company, not a record company! You kind of get the feeling that Apple could step into the fishing rod industry tomorrow and turn that world on its ear just as easily.
I'm sure I've left some important things off the list. The past five months have been so fast-paced in the Macintosh universe that you need a Palm handheld just to keep up (hey, Apple, how about innovating that industry while you're at it?). The amazing part is that there are still seven months left in 2003. We know that MacOS X Panther is just around the corner. There are rumors that new G5 PowerMacs with the fabled PPC 970 processors are coming sooner than later. Apple has promised to bring the iTunes Music Store to long-suffering Windows users this year. And beyond that, who knows what else Apple secretly has waiting on the horizon? Go back and read the above list again, and ask yourself if you could have predicted any of it back on January 1st, 2003.
When it comes to all things Apple, I'm psyched about the last seven months of 2003. If you're not, you're crazy. I hope that the detractors go right on writing their "Apple is rotten to the core" diatribes -- we all need a good laugh now and then. Your comments are welcome.
T-shirts! Get your red hot T-shirts here!
It saddened me to read that MacSurfShop, my long-time source of Macintosh-related T-shirts, is closing down for awhile. So I've decided to do what I can to compensate for the loss, by offering up my own line of T-shirts, apparel, and housewares all centered around the "Macintosh users, you've never had it so good" theme. The items are available through CafePress, and can be found by clicking here. Please note that by purchasing these items, you are doing business with CafePress, not with me, so any questions and/or issues should be directed their way. I know that some of you have been just dying to get your hands on your very own Macintosh-related wall clock, so go for it.
It saddened me to read that MacSurfShop, my long-time source of Macintosh-related T-shirts, is closing down for awhile. So I've decided to do what I can to compensate for the loss, by offering up my own line of T-shirts, apparel, and housewares all centered around the "Macintosh users, you've never had it so good" theme. The items are available through CafePress, and can be found by clicking here. Please note that by purchasing these items, you are doing business with CafePress, not with me, so any questions and/or issues should be directed their way. I know that some of you have been just dying to get your hands on your very own Macintosh-related wall clock, so go for it.
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.
Fifth Graders Living the iLife, Part 2: three days on a tour bus
Two weeks ago, I stepped onto a tour bus with four iBooks, four digital cameras, forty-four fifth graders who had just spent the past two days learning how to use iPhoto 2 and Keynote, and high hopes. I've worked without a net before, but this time I felt like I was working without even a rope. Would the students be willing to participate in a technology project during their three-day trip, or would the equipment just sit on the bus? Had they learned enough about the hardware and software in such a short time that they would be able to put it to good use? Would my hotel room have enough electrical outlets to charge all these batteries? Did I remember to shave? I passed out a laptop and a camera to each adult chaperone, all of whom had agreed to help make this 'great experiment' possible. When I looked over a few minutes later to find one of the students showing her chaperone how Keynote works, I got that good feeling I'd been waiting for. I figured this just might work after all.
The students did a fantastic job of sharing the equipment. One of the few things that they didn't instinctively do right was that they were so fond of taking close-range pictures of each other against meaningless backdrops. Once they were reminded that they were going to need to turn their pictures into a presentable project, they began to find more worthy items to photograph. Because our trip had multiple destinations each day, having the iBooks with us on the bus (something that I had debated up until the last minute) worked out quite well. Students who were sitting with each other generally worked in pairs to upload photos, edit them, move them into Keynote, and create slides that contained meaningful information about each photo. Because we only had one iBook for each eleven students, this was not easy to orchestrate. Each pair of students was given only fifteen minutes of bus time with the iBook. The lesson learned here was to bring more iBooks, something we'll be able to do next year.
Then there was the issue of the lone digital camcorder that became a last-minute addition to our arsenal. I was concerned going in due to the fact that none of the students had been trained on how to use it. When we entered Sea World, I pulled one student aside, taught him how to use it, and allowed him to film for a bit. I told him that it was time to give the camcorder to the next student, and my fears about training vanished when he prompty took it over to her and taught her how to use it. Is there any well-designed technology that these kids can't eat up? But even so, the camcorder didn't make its way around to every student, so while it was a nice addition, it wasn't going to be the heart of the project.
I'm not sure whether it was the time spent in close quarters with so many children, or the fact that I was in the Magic Kingdom, but by the third day of the trip, I was feeling childish enough to pull out the camcorder on Thunder Mountain and film the ride. I share this only because the footage, which I had expected to watch once and delete, came in handy later. What was more exciting was the long bus ride home at the end of the trip. It was after dark, and the bus driver had turned off the lights. The only lights that could be seen were the glow of the four iBooks, which slowly made their way around the bus. By all rights, they should have been asleep by now, after three exhausting days away from home, but no one wanted to doze off and miss their chance with the laptop. So much for the fear that the kids wouldn't want to be bothered with the technology.
While I was pleased with the results, not everything went right. I made a conscious decision to break one of my own rules, which is to never, ever pull brand new equipment out of the box and immediately try to put it to meaningful use, without first becoming completely familiar with it (I'm speaking of the cameras, not the iBooks), and we ran into some issues as a result. Such things were to be expected with such an experimental project that had been assembled in such a short time. In addition, I failed to give the other adults on the trip adequate training with the equipment beforehand. This was entirely my fault, not theirs, and something that can easily be corrected next time around. The final pitfall was that looking back on the Keynote slides that the students had created, a few slides were so pointless that they warranted deletion. However, the students did an excellent job of adhering to our one hard and fast rule that every single slide had to have perfect spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and grammar.
Once we got home, there was plenty more work to be done on the project. The teachers had agreed ahead of time to allow me to take the participating students in small groups the following week so that they would be able to complete their slides. Upon returning to work the following Monday morning, I became so stunningly busy with my other job duties that it would be a full week before I would get the chance to come back and work with the fifth graders. I feared that they would lose interest before I could get to them, and wouldn't want to put in the hard work this late in their last year of elementary school. But these fears were also erased as students asked me when we were going to work on the project every time I passed them in the hallway. The final results, which I'll write about in Part 3, were certainly worth waiting for. In fact, they were better than I ever could have imagined.
Two weeks ago, I stepped onto a tour bus with four iBooks, four digital cameras, forty-four fifth graders who had just spent the past two days learning how to use iPhoto 2 and Keynote, and high hopes. I've worked without a net before, but this time I felt like I was working without even a rope. Would the students be willing to participate in a technology project during their three-day trip, or would the equipment just sit on the bus? Had they learned enough about the hardware and software in such a short time that they would be able to put it to good use? Would my hotel room have enough electrical outlets to charge all these batteries? Did I remember to shave? I passed out a laptop and a camera to each adult chaperone, all of whom had agreed to help make this 'great experiment' possible. When I looked over a few minutes later to find one of the students showing her chaperone how Keynote works, I got that good feeling I'd been waiting for. I figured this just might work after all.
The students did a fantastic job of sharing the equipment. One of the few things that they didn't instinctively do right was that they were so fond of taking close-range pictures of each other against meaningless backdrops. Once they were reminded that they were going to need to turn their pictures into a presentable project, they began to find more worthy items to photograph. Because our trip had multiple destinations each day, having the iBooks with us on the bus (something that I had debated up until the last minute) worked out quite well. Students who were sitting with each other generally worked in pairs to upload photos, edit them, move them into Keynote, and create slides that contained meaningful information about each photo. Because we only had one iBook for each eleven students, this was not easy to orchestrate. Each pair of students was given only fifteen minutes of bus time with the iBook. The lesson learned here was to bring more iBooks, something we'll be able to do next year.
Then there was the issue of the lone digital camcorder that became a last-minute addition to our arsenal. I was concerned going in due to the fact that none of the students had been trained on how to use it. When we entered Sea World, I pulled one student aside, taught him how to use it, and allowed him to film for a bit. I told him that it was time to give the camcorder to the next student, and my fears about training vanished when he prompty took it over to her and taught her how to use it. Is there any well-designed technology that these kids can't eat up? But even so, the camcorder didn't make its way around to every student, so while it was a nice addition, it wasn't going to be the heart of the project.
I'm not sure whether it was the time spent in close quarters with so many children, or the fact that I was in the Magic Kingdom, but by the third day of the trip, I was feeling childish enough to pull out the camcorder on Thunder Mountain and film the ride. I share this only because the footage, which I had expected to watch once and delete, came in handy later. What was more exciting was the long bus ride home at the end of the trip. It was after dark, and the bus driver had turned off the lights. The only lights that could be seen were the glow of the four iBooks, which slowly made their way around the bus. By all rights, they should have been asleep by now, after three exhausting days away from home, but no one wanted to doze off and miss their chance with the laptop. So much for the fear that the kids wouldn't want to be bothered with the technology.
While I was pleased with the results, not everything went right. I made a conscious decision to break one of my own rules, which is to never, ever pull brand new equipment out of the box and immediately try to put it to meaningful use, without first becoming completely familiar with it (I'm speaking of the cameras, not the iBooks), and we ran into some issues as a result. Such things were to be expected with such an experimental project that had been assembled in such a short time. In addition, I failed to give the other adults on the trip adequate training with the equipment beforehand. This was entirely my fault, not theirs, and something that can easily be corrected next time around. The final pitfall was that looking back on the Keynote slides that the students had created, a few slides were so pointless that they warranted deletion. However, the students did an excellent job of adhering to our one hard and fast rule that every single slide had to have perfect spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and grammar.
Once we got home, there was plenty more work to be done on the project. The teachers had agreed ahead of time to allow me to take the participating students in small groups the following week so that they would be able to complete their slides. Upon returning to work the following Monday morning, I became so stunningly busy with my other job duties that it would be a full week before I would get the chance to come back and work with the fifth graders. I feared that they would lose interest before I could get to them, and wouldn't want to put in the hard work this late in their last year of elementary school. But these fears were also erased as students asked me when we were going to work on the project every time I passed them in the hallway. The final results, which I'll write about in Part 3, were certainly worth waiting for. In fact, they were better than I ever could have imagined.
Sunday, May 18, 2003
The Music Store ads suck for a good reason
I'll never forget certain television ads that grabbed my attention by showing something shocking or memorable that had no relation to the product or the company being advertised. I'll also never remember which products or companies those ads were promoting. So thanks to whoever it was that ran those ads for the entertainment that they provided me, but if your goal was product or brand awareness, you wasted your money. At the other extreme, I've watched many ads that went into great, well-reasoned detail about why I should buy this or that, but none of them were interesting enough for me to pay attention. If I were in the mood to do research or listen to intelligent reasoning, I wouldn't be watching TV, would I?
The challenge, then, is to come up with an ad that grabs viewers' attention just enough to deliver a clear, concise message to them about your product, without going so overboard that they only remember the ad and not the product. The greater challenge, of course, is to have a clear, concise message in the first place, so that your product will actually be marketable and understandable. Apple's message with the iTunes Music Store is a very simple one: "your favorite songs, 99 cents each, go to applemusic.com to learn more". Any further explanation would be too much information for the typical ADHD-stricken television viewer. I mean, do people really want to hear about the virtues of AAC compression while they're watching Friends?
Because Apple's message is a simple one, it only has to spend about three seconds passing along that message. That leaves the rest of the commercial open to anything that's going to get viewers in the proper mood to hear (and remember) the message. If you're Apple, you want it to be something that will get people talking, and thinking, and comparing the experiences of the people in the ad to their own experiences, and concluding that the product will allow them to have those experiences all to themselves. Who among us hasn't taken the opportunity to sing our favorite songs out loud when we thought no one was listening, without regard for how out of range or out of key we might be? How many of us would be ebarrassed if we had to do so in front of a camera? When I see those individuals singing along with their iPod, I see myself. When I'm listening to my iPod, I often sing out loud when I think no one is around, despite the fact that I cannot sing very well. If someone catches me, I usually can't help but laugh it off, because the other person probably can't sing very well either. For those who don't have an iPod, the ad should make them realize that they too could be singing out of tune along with their favorite artists.
I was part of a conversation last week (not started by me), concerning which of the two girls in the Music Store ads was the better singer. While this debate had all the merit of an Americal Idol discussion, the conversation did eventually turn to the fact that Apple is indeed selling popular songs for a dollar apiece. In other words, the ads worked. The "hook" in the ads is interesting enough to elicit discussion among viewers, and has just enough relation to the product to get people to remember what that product is. Macintosh users who see the ads should get the message rather quickly, and should be buying music in no time.
Since Apple's product is currently not available to the vast majority (Windows users) of viewers, the key in this case is simply to make them aware that Apple is the new 'King of Digital Music'. If some of them go to applemusic.com only to find out that the service is currently Mac-only, so much the better. It should nudge some of them that much closer to realizing that if you want access to the latest and greatest innovations in personal computing, you have to do so on your Mac, so you need to buy one now. Otherwise, you can stick with your PC and wait another eight months in the hope that Apple will throw you a few breadcrumbs. And then you'll miss out on the next great innovation as well. Oh, and that iPod you bought that you're using with your existing PC? If you get a Mac, you can use your iPod for much greater purposes. You should have bought a Mac to with your iPod in the first place, but here's another chance.
The idea of using the Music Store to lure Windows iPod users over to the correct side of the fence is pure genius. But for most people, the whole idea of downloading compressed music from the Internet, using software to copy it into a hand-held device, and carrying that device around with you so that you can listen to it, is still a foreign concept. Despite the fact that the iPod is the number one selling digital music player, Apple has still sold fewer than a million of them, which means that greater than 99% of computer users have yet to take the plunge. The biggest question I always get about the iPod is, "where do you get the music from?". When I explain that you can pull the music off your existing CD's, the responses I get are usually "that's a lot of work," and "why would I do that when I can just listen to the CD?". While there are ample reasons for why you would indeed want to do it, they do have a point about the irony of pverpaying for a CD, copying the music off of it, and then leaving the CD sitting on a shelf collecting dust.
The "other" method of acquiring music doesn't sound so attractive, either. When you explain what all is involved in downloading music from a pirate network (acquiring extra software, often having to search long and hard to find what you're looking for, and oh yeah, it's not quite legal), it's usually enough to turn most users off. The answer that I've always wanted to give people about where to get music for their iPod is "you can easily and cheaply get the music by using iTunes, and then just drag it into your iPod or burn them with no hassle." Now, I can finally give that answer.
Although they don't go into as much detail, Apple's new ads essentially give that same answer: "Your favorite songs now only cost you a dollar each, and you too can hold a tiny music player in your hand and sing along with the song you just bought so cheaply. Come to our website and learn about how you can join this revolution. We don't care whether or not you can sing, whether you're a kid or an old hippie, whether you listen to the Who or Pink or Eminen. We've got it all, and so can you."
On the surface, Apple's new ads really do suck. They're not particularly enjoyable to watch, even if you're a rabid Mac user like me who would gladly watch thirty seconds of anyhting, as long as it ended with an Apple logo on the screen. But they do a fantastic job of getting the above message across without forcing the viewer to think too much about it. For that reason, they've got my approval. Later on, once the idea of buying music over the Internet has become more accepted and understood, it will be time for Apple to go into more detail about how the Music Store is so much better than it needs to be, and how you wouldn't want to buy music online from anyone else. For now, it's enough to get people talking about the concept and remembering who it is that has brought it to the masses first.
The Music Store doesn't seem to need much advertising right now anyway, considering that Apple has sold over two million songs in sixteen days. That's not bad for a service that's currently limited to MacOS X users who have downloaded and installed iTunes 4 and QuickTime 6.2, and not bad for a service that only has 200,000 songs available so far. It's especially impressive considering that you need to have broadband Internet to enjoy using it, something that all too few computer users have opted for up to this point. The iTunes Music Store would be enough to get me to upgrade to high-speed Internet if I didn't have it already, and I can't be the only one who feels that way. The opportunity to use tools like iTunes 4 and Sherlock 3, not the ability to load the same old web pages faster, is the real argument for moving to broadband, something that more Mac users will probably take to heart once they realize how much time and frustration they can save if they buy their music fifty times faster. So not only do the record labels are artists owe Apple a debt of gratitude for its innovations this time around, so do apparently the Cable and DSL providers who are bound to get new Mac-using, music-loving customers out of this.
It looks like Apple has changed everything and made life better for everyone involved yet again. That's certainly the same old song. Feel free to sing about it yourself.
I'll never forget certain television ads that grabbed my attention by showing something shocking or memorable that had no relation to the product or the company being advertised. I'll also never remember which products or companies those ads were promoting. So thanks to whoever it was that ran those ads for the entertainment that they provided me, but if your goal was product or brand awareness, you wasted your money. At the other extreme, I've watched many ads that went into great, well-reasoned detail about why I should buy this or that, but none of them were interesting enough for me to pay attention. If I were in the mood to do research or listen to intelligent reasoning, I wouldn't be watching TV, would I?
The challenge, then, is to come up with an ad that grabs viewers' attention just enough to deliver a clear, concise message to them about your product, without going so overboard that they only remember the ad and not the product. The greater challenge, of course, is to have a clear, concise message in the first place, so that your product will actually be marketable and understandable. Apple's message with the iTunes Music Store is a very simple one: "your favorite songs, 99 cents each, go to applemusic.com to learn more". Any further explanation would be too much information for the typical ADHD-stricken television viewer. I mean, do people really want to hear about the virtues of AAC compression while they're watching Friends?
Because Apple's message is a simple one, it only has to spend about three seconds passing along that message. That leaves the rest of the commercial open to anything that's going to get viewers in the proper mood to hear (and remember) the message. If you're Apple, you want it to be something that will get people talking, and thinking, and comparing the experiences of the people in the ad to their own experiences, and concluding that the product will allow them to have those experiences all to themselves. Who among us hasn't taken the opportunity to sing our favorite songs out loud when we thought no one was listening, without regard for how out of range or out of key we might be? How many of us would be ebarrassed if we had to do so in front of a camera? When I see those individuals singing along with their iPod, I see myself. When I'm listening to my iPod, I often sing out loud when I think no one is around, despite the fact that I cannot sing very well. If someone catches me, I usually can't help but laugh it off, because the other person probably can't sing very well either. For those who don't have an iPod, the ad should make them realize that they too could be singing out of tune along with their favorite artists.
I was part of a conversation last week (not started by me), concerning which of the two girls in the Music Store ads was the better singer. While this debate had all the merit of an Americal Idol discussion, the conversation did eventually turn to the fact that Apple is indeed selling popular songs for a dollar apiece. In other words, the ads worked. The "hook" in the ads is interesting enough to elicit discussion among viewers, and has just enough relation to the product to get people to remember what that product is. Macintosh users who see the ads should get the message rather quickly, and should be buying music in no time.
Since Apple's product is currently not available to the vast majority (Windows users) of viewers, the key in this case is simply to make them aware that Apple is the new 'King of Digital Music'. If some of them go to applemusic.com only to find out that the service is currently Mac-only, so much the better. It should nudge some of them that much closer to realizing that if you want access to the latest and greatest innovations in personal computing, you have to do so on your Mac, so you need to buy one now. Otherwise, you can stick with your PC and wait another eight months in the hope that Apple will throw you a few breadcrumbs. And then you'll miss out on the next great innovation as well. Oh, and that iPod you bought that you're using with your existing PC? If you get a Mac, you can use your iPod for much greater purposes. You should have bought a Mac to with your iPod in the first place, but here's another chance.
The idea of using the Music Store to lure Windows iPod users over to the correct side of the fence is pure genius. But for most people, the whole idea of downloading compressed music from the Internet, using software to copy it into a hand-held device, and carrying that device around with you so that you can listen to it, is still a foreign concept. Despite the fact that the iPod is the number one selling digital music player, Apple has still sold fewer than a million of them, which means that greater than 99% of computer users have yet to take the plunge. The biggest question I always get about the iPod is, "where do you get the music from?". When I explain that you can pull the music off your existing CD's, the responses I get are usually "that's a lot of work," and "why would I do that when I can just listen to the CD?". While there are ample reasons for why you would indeed want to do it, they do have a point about the irony of pverpaying for a CD, copying the music off of it, and then leaving the CD sitting on a shelf collecting dust.
The "other" method of acquiring music doesn't sound so attractive, either. When you explain what all is involved in downloading music from a pirate network (acquiring extra software, often having to search long and hard to find what you're looking for, and oh yeah, it's not quite legal), it's usually enough to turn most users off. The answer that I've always wanted to give people about where to get music for their iPod is "you can easily and cheaply get the music by using iTunes, and then just drag it into your iPod or burn them with no hassle." Now, I can finally give that answer.
Although they don't go into as much detail, Apple's new ads essentially give that same answer: "Your favorite songs now only cost you a dollar each, and you too can hold a tiny music player in your hand and sing along with the song you just bought so cheaply. Come to our website and learn about how you can join this revolution. We don't care whether or not you can sing, whether you're a kid or an old hippie, whether you listen to the Who or Pink or Eminen. We've got it all, and so can you."
On the surface, Apple's new ads really do suck. They're not particularly enjoyable to watch, even if you're a rabid Mac user like me who would gladly watch thirty seconds of anyhting, as long as it ended with an Apple logo on the screen. But they do a fantastic job of getting the above message across without forcing the viewer to think too much about it. For that reason, they've got my approval. Later on, once the idea of buying music over the Internet has become more accepted and understood, it will be time for Apple to go into more detail about how the Music Store is so much better than it needs to be, and how you wouldn't want to buy music online from anyone else. For now, it's enough to get people talking about the concept and remembering who it is that has brought it to the masses first.
The Music Store doesn't seem to need much advertising right now anyway, considering that Apple has sold over two million songs in sixteen days. That's not bad for a service that's currently limited to MacOS X users who have downloaded and installed iTunes 4 and QuickTime 6.2, and not bad for a service that only has 200,000 songs available so far. It's especially impressive considering that you need to have broadband Internet to enjoy using it, something that all too few computer users have opted for up to this point. The iTunes Music Store would be enough to get me to upgrade to high-speed Internet if I didn't have it already, and I can't be the only one who feels that way. The opportunity to use tools like iTunes 4 and Sherlock 3, not the ability to load the same old web pages faster, is the real argument for moving to broadband, something that more Mac users will probably take to heart once they realize how much time and frustration they can save if they buy their music fifty times faster. So not only do the record labels are artists owe Apple a debt of gratitude for its innovations this time around, so do apparently the Cable and DSL providers who are bound to get new Mac-using, music-loving customers out of this.
It looks like Apple has changed everything and made life better for everyone involved yet again. That's certainly the same old song. Feel free to sing about it yourself.
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.
Tuesday, May 06, 2003
Can Apple score ten billion dollars for a song?
Somewhere along the line, Collective Soul fell off my radar entirely. Back in the mid-nineties, a self-titled album that I adored was followed up by an album from the band that didn't do much for me. So when they released subsequent records, I couldn't bring myself to purchase them. Eventually I lost track of whether the band was even still together. That was, of course, until I saw Collective Soul perform at Music MidTown in Atlanta this past weekend. The greatest-hits performance reminded me of just how many great songs the band had recorded since I stopped buying its albums. When I got home, I knew exactly what I had to do: go shopping at the iTunes Music Store.
Thanks to the thirty-second previews, I was able to quickly identify the songs I was looking for, and around a half-dozen of them became iPod fodder within seconds. There's no way I would have gone out and bought those CD's at full price, so this was six dollars that neither the artist nor the record company would ever have seen if it weren't for Apple's innovative new way of separating us from our money on our terms. I'm almost embarrassed to admit that these six tracks bring my total number of purchases to a paltry eight songs so far, but this has been due simply to a lack of time on my part. There's so much music I want to sit down and buy, I don't even know where to begin. I just can't seem to stay in town lately.
It's a good thing that other Mac-heads haven't been as pressed for time. With precious little help from me, the Mac community has managed to nab over a million songs at a buck a piece in the first week. Invoking some legendary bad math, we can take a few wild guesses at what the first week's sales might translate into when iTunes for Windows finally rears its (probably quite literally) ugly head. Let's start with the fact that there were one million downloads of iTunes 4, which translates to a current potential user base of one million customers. We'll assume all of the following ludicrous propositions: one song per week per potential user will remain a constant throughout, and there are 200 million total Internet-enabled consumer computers in the United States. We'll even assume 50 weeks in a year just to make sure everyone understands that this is phony math, and thus we're looking at ten billion dollars in annual revenue from the Music Store domestically. While this number was arrived at by making some rather ridiculous assumptions, it does represent more annual revenue than Apple currently brings in from all of its other divisions combined. For that reason alone, it's worth pondering the ten billion for a moment before dismissing it for the picked-out-of-a-hat figure that it is. I'm not suggesting that it will actually happen, but it's fascinating to imagine what all it would mean for Apple if it did.
In case anyone is wondering, Collective Soul put on a fantastic show Saturday night and proudly pronounced that they're "back". The unfinished tracks they played from their upcoming album sounded promising, and led me to wonder: when the album comes out, will I buy it in the store or just download the whole thing? For now, I'm just glad I'll have that choice.
For regular readers, I'm afraid I must head out tomorrow morning on another little out-of-town excursion that will keep me away from my keyboard for a few days, but this time it's for a good cause: I have the privilege of chaperoning an overnight school field trip. There's a technology component involved with the trip that will certainly take our technology program to new places, and I can't wait to share the results here once I return. But for now, I'm off to make sure the batteries are charged on what suddenly seems like one-too-many digital devices to carry over one shoulder. I don't know if it will all work out as expected, but the kids say they're ready to try anything, and it just might all fall into place. Fifth graders living the iLife -- the great experiment begins. See you in three days.
Somewhere along the line, Collective Soul fell off my radar entirely. Back in the mid-nineties, a self-titled album that I adored was followed up by an album from the band that didn't do much for me. So when they released subsequent records, I couldn't bring myself to purchase them. Eventually I lost track of whether the band was even still together. That was, of course, until I saw Collective Soul perform at Music MidTown in Atlanta this past weekend. The greatest-hits performance reminded me of just how many great songs the band had recorded since I stopped buying its albums. When I got home, I knew exactly what I had to do: go shopping at the iTunes Music Store.
Thanks to the thirty-second previews, I was able to quickly identify the songs I was looking for, and around a half-dozen of them became iPod fodder within seconds. There's no way I would have gone out and bought those CD's at full price, so this was six dollars that neither the artist nor the record company would ever have seen if it weren't for Apple's innovative new way of separating us from our money on our terms. I'm almost embarrassed to admit that these six tracks bring my total number of purchases to a paltry eight songs so far, but this has been due simply to a lack of time on my part. There's so much music I want to sit down and buy, I don't even know where to begin. I just can't seem to stay in town lately.
It's a good thing that other Mac-heads haven't been as pressed for time. With precious little help from me, the Mac community has managed to nab over a million songs at a buck a piece in the first week. Invoking some legendary bad math, we can take a few wild guesses at what the first week's sales might translate into when iTunes for Windows finally rears its (probably quite literally) ugly head. Let's start with the fact that there were one million downloads of iTunes 4, which translates to a current potential user base of one million customers. We'll assume all of the following ludicrous propositions: one song per week per potential user will remain a constant throughout, and there are 200 million total Internet-enabled consumer computers in the United States. We'll even assume 50 weeks in a year just to make sure everyone understands that this is phony math, and thus we're looking at ten billion dollars in annual revenue from the Music Store domestically. While this number was arrived at by making some rather ridiculous assumptions, it does represent more annual revenue than Apple currently brings in from all of its other divisions combined. For that reason alone, it's worth pondering the ten billion for a moment before dismissing it for the picked-out-of-a-hat figure that it is. I'm not suggesting that it will actually happen, but it's fascinating to imagine what all it would mean for Apple if it did.
In case anyone is wondering, Collective Soul put on a fantastic show Saturday night and proudly pronounced that they're "back". The unfinished tracks they played from their upcoming album sounded promising, and led me to wonder: when the album comes out, will I buy it in the store or just download the whole thing? For now, I'm just glad I'll have that choice.
For regular readers, I'm afraid I must head out tomorrow morning on another little out-of-town excursion that will keep me away from my keyboard for a few days, but this time it's for a good cause: I have the privilege of chaperoning an overnight school field trip. There's a technology component involved with the trip that will certainly take our technology program to new places, and I can't wait to share the results here once I return. But for now, I'm off to make sure the batteries are charged on what suddenly seems like one-too-many digital devices to carry over one shoulder. I don't know if it will all work out as expected, but the kids say they're ready to try anything, and it just might all fall into place. Fifth graders living the iLife -- the great experiment begins. See you in three days.
Thursday, May 01, 2003
In with a bang: new iPods to enter Apple Stores this Friday with volume cranked
Sometimes I think that the most gratifying surprises from Apple are the ones that had every detail leaked the public well in advance, yet when finally presented as a full package, still manage to shock the world. The iTunes Music Store certainly managed to fall into that category. Even though we knew that Apple had struck deals with all five major record labels, even though we knew that new iPods were coming, even though we essentially knew that the format would be a dollar a song, none of us realized that this was all going to add up to the surreal experience that is buying music with iTunes 4. It's the kind of potentially life-changing new feauture that will drive Mac users to upgrade to broadband, users of older Macs to upgrade to new ones, PC users to Switch, and when it's eventually launched for Windows, it will even cause Apple-haters and Mac-detractors to suddenly become gleeful regular Apple customers (even if it's only one dollar at a time). It's just that big of a deal. Heck, it's currently netting Apple four dollars of revenue per second -- and that's not counting all the new iPods that will be sold starting tomorrow.
When you've got juice this powerful, you'd better put it to good use, and it appears that Apple is coming out of the gates swinging this Friday when it holds nationwide events at all of its retail stores, complete with in-store DJ's, prizes and commemorative posters. And get this -- for the first time, Apple is even going to sell T-shirts in its stores, and for that matter, they're specially made just to commemorate this event. It just so happens that I'll be in Atlanta, Georgia this weekend to take in Atlanta's Music MidTown festival, but lucky for me there's an Apple Store just a few miles from where I'm staying. I'm going to be at the Atlanta Apple Store from 6:00-7:00 pm Friday before heading over to the festival. If any Atlantans plan to be there and want to meet up, l'll be the one wearing the T-shirt with the Neilsen quote about how Mac users are better educated and have a higher income than their Windows-using counterparts. I'll be sure to post a full report of the Apple Store festivities for those readers who don't have a local store of their own, or simply have something better to do on a Friday night than hang out at a computer store.
Although my road trip may keep me offline for a day or two (and please forgive any delay in responding to email), I promise to make it up to all of you with soon-to-be-forthcoming details of the iLife plus Keynote student project that a few of my coworkers and I are arranging for our outgoing fifth graders. It's our last chance to use technology to make a truly lasting difference in their education before passing them on to middle school, and this project just might do it. Although I suppose others may have already done something similar with their elementary students (I sure hope so, for the students' sake), it's certainly new to our school. We like to push the envelope with educational technology when we can, but this is something new entirely. It's almost got me more excited than the MusicMidtown festival. I always cherish aby opportunity to jump back in and work directly with the students on educational technology projects, especially when it's a project like this one. But first things first, I've got a few dozen great bands to take in this weekend. And for those of you in the Atlanta area, I'll see you at the Apple Store this Friday at 6:00. It's not just the best time to be a Macintosh user, it's also the most exciting.
Sometimes I think that the most gratifying surprises from Apple are the ones that had every detail leaked the public well in advance, yet when finally presented as a full package, still manage to shock the world. The iTunes Music Store certainly managed to fall into that category. Even though we knew that Apple had struck deals with all five major record labels, even though we knew that new iPods were coming, even though we essentially knew that the format would be a dollar a song, none of us realized that this was all going to add up to the surreal experience that is buying music with iTunes 4. It's the kind of potentially life-changing new feauture that will drive Mac users to upgrade to broadband, users of older Macs to upgrade to new ones, PC users to Switch, and when it's eventually launched for Windows, it will even cause Apple-haters and Mac-detractors to suddenly become gleeful regular Apple customers (even if it's only one dollar at a time). It's just that big of a deal. Heck, it's currently netting Apple four dollars of revenue per second -- and that's not counting all the new iPods that will be sold starting tomorrow.
When you've got juice this powerful, you'd better put it to good use, and it appears that Apple is coming out of the gates swinging this Friday when it holds nationwide events at all of its retail stores, complete with in-store DJ's, prizes and commemorative posters. And get this -- for the first time, Apple is even going to sell T-shirts in its stores, and for that matter, they're specially made just to commemorate this event. It just so happens that I'll be in Atlanta, Georgia this weekend to take in Atlanta's Music MidTown festival, but lucky for me there's an Apple Store just a few miles from where I'm staying. I'm going to be at the Atlanta Apple Store from 6:00-7:00 pm Friday before heading over to the festival. If any Atlantans plan to be there and want to meet up, l'll be the one wearing the T-shirt with the Neilsen quote about how Mac users are better educated and have a higher income than their Windows-using counterparts. I'll be sure to post a full report of the Apple Store festivities for those readers who don't have a local store of their own, or simply have something better to do on a Friday night than hang out at a computer store.
Although my road trip may keep me offline for a day or two (and please forgive any delay in responding to email), I promise to make it up to all of you with soon-to-be-forthcoming details of the iLife plus Keynote student project that a few of my coworkers and I are arranging for our outgoing fifth graders. It's our last chance to use technology to make a truly lasting difference in their education before passing them on to middle school, and this project just might do it. Although I suppose others may have already done something similar with their elementary students (I sure hope so, for the students' sake), it's certainly new to our school. We like to push the envelope with educational technology when we can, but this is something new entirely. It's almost got me more excited than the MusicMidtown festival. I always cherish aby opportunity to jump back in and work directly with the students on educational technology projects, especially when it's a project like this one. But first things first, I've got a few dozen great bands to take in this weekend. And for those of you in the Atlanta area, I'll see you at the Apple Store this Friday at 6:00. It's not just the best time to be a Macintosh user, it's also the most exciting.
