Wednesday

Wednesday //Today Peter, our very youthful Apple facilitator, coined this phrase of ultimate coolness that only geeks like us can appreciate when referring to cool Apple applications stuff. Today was totally SWEET Hotness!// We started the day with more sharing sessions.
 * 1) Teacher choice to create student choice - A school district gave teachers the choice to choose either a MacBook Pro or a PC laptop. 93% of the teachers chose a MBP. It enhance their learning initiative. They replaced all teacher desktops with laptops and iPads. Student use many applications to help them learn in different ways.
 * 2) iPad and iPod carts, teachers in an elementary school. Teachers were urged to be more innovative. WE saw demos of curriculum based assessment for music using Drum Kit light for iPad. A student composed a song and played it on the drum kit. We also saw how Edmodo (a Facebook-like social networking site for schools and classes) was being used by a class and heard about its transformative nature.
 * 3) Using technology to facilitate learning - we saw laptops, desktops, and other mobile devices in action at a Michigan school and heard about the impact on learning from the students.
 * 4) We saw a demo of how students were using iPads to do specific map lessons using Moodle and an iPad app called PhotoWall to compare two maps of China. Students downloaded two maps from Moodle then overlaid the two maps to compare the change in borders. They used PhotoWall to make the top layer more opaque then wrote their hypothesis as to why the borders may have changed over time, considering things like access to rivers, where mountains were located, and key historical events during that time period.
 * 5) We saw how a New York school was embracing technology and learned how students used mobile devices to do creative things that enhance their learning.
 * 6) We learned how one technology facilitator was helping his staff gain more time by using technology effectively. See his iCeption movie [|here].

Today we learned about iLife '11 products. Our school district will receive these applications during our next replacement cycle. Although there are some great new features, I have found that the things I learned about iLife '11 can be applied to our iLife '09 products.

First part of the assignment was to take an iPod and go take some still shots and video. It was a blast to see everybody snapping pictures of everybody else, of our surroundings, or just getting plain goofy. I posted my album on my [|facebook] page. Go ahead, friend me - I will be your friend!
 * iPhoto on Mac:**

We learned how to import pictures from 3 different sources -
 * 1) An Internet browser
 * 2) iPads or iPods
 * 3) The laptop's desktop

We took a look at the main ways of viewing and organizing pictures through Events, Photos, Faces and Places tabl and the new way of editing. We learned how to create albums, remembering that the library holds the photos and when photos are put into albums, you CANNOT delete them from the library or they will go into the iPhoto trash. The iPhoto trash is different from the regular trash so some of you may have a lot of photos in your iPhoto trash awaiting emptying. You should check by going to iPhoto then file and iPhoto trash. Once you empty that trash it goes into the computer trash and then when you empty the system trash they finally go away.

We also learned about how to use the iPhoto adjustments. By sliding the initial slider in to the highest peak and the right most to where the colors on the chart begin and the middle arrow to the highest peak in the middle, you will get a much better quality picture.

**Garage Band for the Mac:**We learned how to create a podcast by reading a premade script and adding premade graphics. We enhanced the podcast with premade jingles then learned about the best way to upload the podcast. We also discussed how ti could be added to a Pages document that can be made into an ePub doc that could be loaded onto an iPad. Hotness! **iMovie for the iOS device (iPod or iPad)**This is something I had not learned how to do until today. I appreciated the very easy way students could use their iPad to take pictures or video then immediately create with it. It's a whole creation studio in one package. You can do almost anything on the iPad iMovie that you can do on iMovie for Mac except movie trailers. It was a great eye opening experience and really helped me see that an iPad does have its place in content creation. **iMovie for Mac**Again, I appreciated the nuts and bolts of the learning on iMovie '11. There are new additions to the program for better user ease. For instance, you can mark your clips as favorites then filter out all the not-so-favorite stuff for easy access to your clips. This also eliminates you accidentally deleting a clip you may need later. The map animation is very cool because it can show a map location of anywhere in the worl you want to show, showing a point of origin and a point of landing. There are advanced tools found in preferences that allow you to do things like cutaways, green screen, blue screen, etc. (also features of our current iMovie version). It's also good that we have regained the wave volume control on clips to have more options with sound right in iMovie. We also learned how to auto summarize using a system preference. Students can auto-summarize anything: a web page, part of their digital textbook, something they wrote, etc. Check out these links to read more about accessibility features: []
 * The Mac OS and its Special Needs built in features **One of the best features of the day - and all the stuff up to this point was cool... The Mac Operating System is designed to meet the needs of all learners, helping people with motor, cognitive, and visual impairments. Research shows that we have over 7 million students with special needs. Apple has helped make their devices more accessible be creating built in, not bolted on, accessibility enhancements. You can find a lot of the built in features right in the Universal Access Preferences by going to your Apple menu in the upper left hand corner of your screen then pull down to Preferences. Find the icon that looks like this in the lower right corner of the window. This is where you will be able to make adjustments for seeing, hearing, using the keyboard, and using the mouse and trackpad.
 * Vision features
 * Hearing features
 * Physical and Motor skill features
 * Literacy and Learning features

Here is just a bonus page of really cool stuff: []