Introduction

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by pete whitfield on May 19, 2007 at 2:23pm

Thanks for starting this Shawn.
Your point 1 - I'm over being smug about my Mac, or trying to convert my Windows colleagues - what I would prefer to be able to say to them is 'all these thing I can do so easily on a Mac, they are all possible on a PC'. Except I don't know whether that is true. So if there are any Windows worshippers who have strayed in here, maybe they could list good Windows alternatives to iLife. Until teachers see that making audio and video is as easy as making Word docs, multi media in T&L will be a side show.
Your point 3 (yes, I know I missed 2!) Yes - multimedia is the future of presentation. I'm doing a professional development teacher ed course at the moment and we are bogged down in text - both what comes at us (handouts and materials) and what we have to return (assignments). Barely even a nod to 21st Century learning. If teacher ed is stuck in the last millenium.....it doesn't bare thinking about.

Attachments:

• hishawn.mov, 973 KB

Permalink Reply by Linda Loder on May 20, 2007 at 8:12pm

I live in two comptuer worlds myself. I came from the PC world, and learned the Mac, and now I guess I am about as "bi-system" as I'm going to get. My office is PC, but I'm one of three Mac users in about 70 employees. Since we support school districts that use Mac, the office tolerates those of us who are Mac converts! ;)

I really love my Mac for production - there is so much you can do with it right, as the commercials say, out of the box! I am not a network person, I am a 'user coach' person, so most of what I do is teach applications. And yep, I do teach software in both worlds.

Making podcasts can be done on a PC - we use Audacity. Not quite as user friendly as GarageBand, granted; but it can be done and the finished product is just as good. We use Microsoft Office across the board, both platforms. Inspiration and KidPics - both platforms; where my PC fails in comparison is iWeb - gotta love it. It is the easiest way to helpt teachers and kids make a web page - and it didn't cost anything for the software - it's just a part of iLife! As for movies, well, you can make pretty nice movies with MovieMaker on a PC.

In fact, when I host classes for teachers, I host both platforms at the same time and it is not as confusing as it sounds. If you're focusing on what your going to do as a result - what the students and teachers will be able to know and do, then you can teach both platforms in the same group at the same time.

When I teach movie making, for example, I teach iMovie and MovieMaker at the same time. Sometimes I use two laptops, one Mac and one PC, and two projectors, but what we're doing is learning how to storyboard, shoot video and photos, download video and photos, record narrations and music, and put movies together. Platform can be pretty unimportant in the grand scheme of things. MovieMaker has good instruction pieces available in their 'help' section and online - I often print them out for beginning PC teachers who like to have handouts to help them out.

Permalink Reply by Connie Weber on May 19, 2007 at 2:59pm

I am a Mac person in a Mac world, quite spoiled. Most kids in my class have MacBooks. The computers are constantly in use during class time.
I have an "old" iBook, about 3 years old.
For high school graduation, my daughter is getting the brand new MacBook. It should arrive today!!! She was peeved that they're holding out on introducing the new leopard operating system until November. Have you seen the demo of leopard? Awe-inspiring. My daughter's computer is coming preloaded with LogicExpress, the music-making program that extends GarageBand's capability to the cosmos.
I would say that one of Macs absolute key features is its ability to handle music--and I see at least one musician in this group...

Permalink Reply by Claude Almansi on May 20, 2007 at 10:26am

The first computer I used was a Mac, which we bought to write an anthology in 1983 or 1984. At one point its E key stopped working and repairing it would have been so expensive we bought a MacPlus instead. I went on using the old Mac typing $ instead of E then doing "change all" for years when my husband and later my daughter were using the MacPlus. Then in 1994, the publisher for which my husband was editing a short story review bought him an LC3, with a vague idea to use the internet with it. The internet part didn't work out, but the LC3 was great.

When it collapsed in 2001, I moved over to Windows: a Sony Vaio laptop, cheaper than equivalent Macs - apparently that is, because if I count the time wasted in updates, checking for spyware etc, it wasn't. The Vaio went bit by bit: first the screen lamp died, so I used it with a monitor, but it sort of defeated the purpose of having a laptop. Then the battery died, which definitely put pay to using it as a portable thing. Then in January 2006 the ventilator croaked, so I transfered my files to an external disk in bouts of 30 seconds.

At that point, I had a choice between a Y2K "Bundy" iMac, and a more recent Windows computer. I tried both for a fortnight, and chose the Bundy. Grrrreat machine once I updated it from OS 10.1.5 - on which none of the programs I liked (openoffice, firefox, thunderbird) would run - to OS 10.4, though of course it meant forgetting about using iMovie - but I wasn't particularly interested in video editing back then. Now I have bought a MacBook, so I can do video editing on it.

Question about TextEdit though: it seems to have a weird kind of UTF-8 encoding that is not fully compatible with other, non Mac, text editors. Is there a way to fix that?

Permalink Reply by Connie Weber on May 20, 2007 at 2:38pm

Shawn,
I'm not sure if these are only for Macs, but they are definitely associated with Macs. I asked my son about the best old programs for Macs, and his answer is Zoombinis. He also liked KidPix and The Incredible Machine. I love Inspiration, and the new Inspiration especially, with InpireData.
What applications are installed on your machines right now?
iMovie is superb. Will the old computers run it? I think they will. It's one of the best multimedia-production programs, very easy to use. We could even join up some kids in your class with some kids in mine, and get everything launched--my kids are used to teaching others how to use it. Just let me know if you're interested.
Podcasting is especially easy to do. With a halfway decent mic, you're off and producing! See the discussion "Book Review Podcasting Project" for a great example. Elizabeth Davis posted this forum. She sends along some wonderful resources, and you could use her "how-to's" for GarageBand.

Permalink Reply by Shawn Moore on May 20, 2007 at 6:26pm

Connie,
Right now I am loading OS X 10.3.9 onto all of the machines. This has iMovie as part of the package. I haven't done anything with iMovie myself, so I would love to hook up our classes for some peer collaboration. Unfortunately, all of the RAM was removed from these machines, so I am juggling the few chips that I have between them to get the OS loaded, etc... That coupled with the fact that we are 1 week from end-of-year testing and 3 weeks from the end of school, means that my little project is going to have to wait until next year most likely. I am finishing a cell project with my students that entails them making some sort of multimedia product, so I will probably hit you up for some pointers over the next few weeks.

My big plans for these machines are as follows:
The two powermac G3 B&W (circa 1999?) can take 1GB of RAM and I can upgrade the processors to 1Ghz G4 processors pretty easily. This will cost about $400 per computer. I'm not sure about upgrading the video cards from the stock ATI Rage 128 card that came with it, but if anyone has a suggestion I am all ears.

The four iMacs will get 512 MB of RAM each at a cost of about $50 per machine. They will be little workstations and then the B&W's can be the workhorses for serious multimedia production.

Sadly, I am writing this on the most modern mac I own, a 2001 G3 iBook, running OS X 10.4.9. I am a little outdated for some of the software that I would like to start using, like Omnidazzle and Mouspose, but I should still be able to do screencasting using Snapzpro! I am really interested in exploring GarageBand, too.

Permalink Reply by Claude Almansi on June 1, 2007 at 1:58am

"iMovie is superb. Will the old computers run it? I think they will. " (Connie Weber)
I agree with your 1st sentence, Connie, but you do need quite a bit of RAM to have it work properly: that's how I inherited the Y2K iMac from my brother: he had boosted the RAM from 256 to 378 (?) k, but it was still not enough for efficiently running iMovie, so he got a new machine and gave me his iMac.

Permalink Reply by Scott S. Floyd on May 31, 2007 at 9:36pm

Hey Shawn! Thanks for this group. I am also a Mac Newbie in a PC world. While my IT hates the fact there is a Mac roaming the network now, he understands the need for other platforms for efficiency. When he told me I could have one but he was never going to repair it, all I could do was laugh. He has yet to have to lay a finger on it.

So now I bought a podcasting server from Mac. Again, to his chagrin, he had to admit its superiority for the need we have. We are in a test mode with it right now, but it will be in full use when school begins next year. One small leap for Mac, one giant leap for teachers.

Oh, and since this is an introductions thread, I am a middle school language arts teacher and a gifted and talented coordinator from east Texas. Let's get this out of the way now: Howdy, Y'all. I feel better now.

Permalink Reply by Yancy Gunhammer on June 10, 2007 at 4:39pm

I also use mac servers in my district , we have 14 different Xserv G4 servers - i am using these for internal moodle site, internal website and blogs, and well as using the streaming video feature. They are great servers and you can find application for them almost everywhere.

I do most of the IT work and have been encouraging the use of these server to provide content for our students. i find it harder to convince the adult to use the technology than the students.

Permalink Reply by Dale Witte on December 13, 2007 at 5:14pm

Yancy, I noticed that you are using Moodle. I ran across it a couple of months ago when someone told me that it could be used for online tests and quizzes, but I haven't had any time to research it. How do you use it? What would I need to know before setting up Moodle for a class that I teach?

Permalink Reply by George Somers on May 31, 2007 at 10:38pm

I prefer to use the term coined by Victor Caijiao of the Typical Mac Podcast. While "switchers" have changed platforms entirely, I think most of us are "sliders", those who are constantly changing between platforms as we move from home to work, from classroom to computer lab. I think this is a valuable skill, and I often boast that my school is a "slider" school as we have Macs in the computer lab and PC's in the classrooms. For the most part, the students just "slide" from one to the other, except for when they forget to quit a Mac application because they only closed the window. :)

Permalink Reply by Deb on June 7, 2007 at 12:05pm

Hi Shawn,
I started my career on a TRS-80 and then moved to Mac almost 25 years ago. I spent most of my career on Macs until recently. My job now requires me to be proficient on both platforms. You probably won't love what I am about to say, but sometimes free isn't a bargain. The only way it works is if your users don't have expectations that the machine you are giving them is going to be magically transformed to do what the new macs they see elsewhere can do. Unless you have a magic wand up your sleeve, this isn't going to happen. If they just need to do a bit of word processing or desktop publixhing, everything will be fine, but if the expectation is to browse the web, use iMovie, Garageband, etc.... you will constantly be hearing complaints and dealing with problems. Just my two cents.
Deb

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