Dead Finger Apps

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Sholom Eisenstat on May 27, 2007 at 8:33pm

I think that the mac should play to its strengths in the secondary grades enabling students to work with graphical information, images, visualization, game design, video and audio. It's a full set of tools to support project based learning.
The base set of apps on macs are great. I would add a publishing tool, 3D modeller, and graphic organizer.

Permalink Reply by Robin Martin on May 28, 2007 at 5:04pm

I love this question! I am currently preparing a staff development program on that very topic! As soon as I get my moodle address, I would love some critique from you all. I would answer your question as blogging, wikis, and del.icio.us.

Permalink Reply by George Somers on May 31, 2007 at 9:31pm

iShowU is fastastic for making screen casts with audio from a microphone. It's MUCH cheaper than Camtasia on the PC. www.shinywhitebox.com

Permalink Reply by Jamey Osborne on May 31, 2007 at 9:42pm

My vote is for my Moodle server..... You can take it from me, but you'd be in for a fight! I'd also say del.icio.us is a key tool --I recognize how critical it is now because our new filter blocks it! We're also starting to use wikis extensively and I wouldn't want to be without them either!

Permalink Reply by Claude Almansi on June 1, 2007 at 2:29am

Audacity, downloadable from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/. Open Source. It's a very easy to use and efficient audio editor. And there are extremely good free online manuals for it.

NeoOffice, downloadable from http://www.neooffice.org/. Open Source. The directly for-Mac version of OpenOffice. Office suites may not be very 2.0, but they still are handy at times. 2.0 has some glitches (at times I have to force-quit it because it won't quit normally), but now there's 2.1, which I haven't installed yet, which probably fixed that. Great help material in http://neowiki.neooffice.org/ and at the forums.

Snapz Pro X - shareware free but worth paying $69 for full features. Downloadable from http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/. Great for screencasting and very easy to use.

Permalink Reply by Tom Woodward on June 1, 2007 at 7:59pm

For my computer it'd be applescript, quicksilver, omnigraffle, snapz pro, comic life, and final cut pro. I'm also becoming a bigger and bigger fan of garageband. Web based would be wordpress and google maps.

For kids I'd have to go with Garageband, omnigraffle, comiclife and google earth.
Web based would be google maps, wordpress, and quia.

Permalink Reply by Connie Mitchum on June 6, 2007 at 11:49am

The whole enchilada. I love my mac lab! Our school is switching from windows to Mac. There was some resistance in the beginning so the very first mobile lab we had was windows. Yuck! It was totally useless. Finally my husband (who is tech. director) convinced the school board to buy an iBook mobile lab. We now have 5 in our building. The windows lab has not been used at all.

For all of you Mac people here's a funny link that really depicts the problem with windows.

http://www.wimp.com/windows/