Edutopia: Fast Forward: A School District Redefines Learning

Not only is this a nice article promoting project approach learning, but the elementary school I work at is featured in the article!


some of the wonderful children I work with


two of my favorite people



Pixelmator



This is an open-source based commercial photo editor with a very unique-looking interface. It also integrates with a lot of Mac OS X technologies, and it features GPU acceleration. It's due out in July and will cost $59. I'll definitely be downloading this when it becomes available.

Also, TUAW has posted a video of the application in action.

Tags: education, work, software

It's the last week of the school year, and things are insane. Here are some quick bits to keep you entertained until I can formulate a more substantial post.

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I just finished supporting one of our fourth grade teacher's movie-making project with her class. The children wrote, directed, and starred in their own production. A good time was had by all – except for us adults who had to piece everything together in the end!

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editing the film in iMovie & iDVD

On a related note, I'm also trying to finish up this year's fifth grade memories DVD. Even though I'm ahead of schedule compared to previous years, it still feels like this project will never be done! Throw a talent show into the mix, and things just get nutty!

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In totally unrelated news, I noticed that the most recent version of NeoOffice displays the correct "close" widget on unsaved documents! You might remember that I noted this as a flaw in my overview of NeoOffice earlier this year.




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Finally, this made me utter a hushed "woot!" of awe:



To paraphrase the cinematic trailer – it's about time, indeed.

Tags: work, video games, technology, neooffice

May is the long dark tea time of the soul around here, resulting in the site pretty much going dormant for a month. Well, that is all over, and it's time to write about this year's DVD created for our fifth grade's completion ceremony.

The Process

Just like last year, no souls were tortured with Microsoft products throughout the duration of this project. Well, that's not quite true. I tried to burn a photo CD at work, but the computer kept crashing mid-burn. I still think the paltry 256 MB of memory on those things is the root of all evil.

• All photographs of teachers and children were dumped into iPhoto where they were organized and enhanced. This year's school album contained over 600 images at one point.
• The slideshow of images was assembled in Keynote and exported as a QuickTime file.
• All music was handled by Sibelius 3.
• The children were recorded using Audio Hijack and organized in iTunes.
• Everything gets put together in iMovie.
• iDVD finished everything up.

The Good

iPhoto never missed a beat, and the new editing features (coupled with Keynote 3's image enhancement options) allowed me to entirely remove Photoshop Elements from my workflow. Furthermore, with all of my media being stored in iPhoto and iTunes, nothing was more than a click or two away thanks to the Media Browser built into all of Apple's iWork and iLife applications. Have I ever mentioned that I love Keynote?

Sibelius 3 worked very smoothly this time around. Christine's emotional melodies once again provided great inspiration, and I was able to create more original content to compliment her material.

iMovie HD was great to work in, and it saved my bacon too. (More on that later.) Finally, iDVD was as simple and intuitive as ever. The Drop Zones Editor was a great addition to the interface of that product.

The Scary

iDVD (surprise) did cause one scary moment when it repeatedly crashed while encoding audio. Fortunately, I went back to iMovie and saved the whole package as a self-contained QuickTime file. With that done, iDVD had no problem burning the final DVD.

Life Lessons

Again, I allowed things to get rushed because I wanted to include some school functions that were just a couple of days before the completion ceremony. Consequently, I couldn't finish up the music until I knew for sure how long the slides were going to last, and I allowed myself no time to account for major glitches like the one I experienced. Because of this, I had no copies of the DVD to sell at the completion ceremony, and I had to take orders instead.

Furthermore, music composition became a frenzied process at the end, and the music did not quite match the visuals. There is one particularly apparent moment of awkward silence where I ran out of music. Fortunately, I was able to correct this for the DVDs that parents will be receiving.

The moral of the story? I need to set a date I want everything compiled by so I can enter into the duplication process with less time pressure. The final step is always where things go wrong. As a result, this is where I need to allow myself the most time. Anything that falls after that date will just not be included in the DVD.

The Conclusion of the Matter

Overall, the DVD went well. There was one major snag, but it was easily resolved. Time is my biggest enemy every year, and I just need to realize that I do have control over that variable. I was my own worst obstacle when it came to time, so that's something I can learn to work around.

Product Links

Apple iLife – includes iPhoto, iMovie HD, iDVD, GarageBand, and iWeb.

Apple iWork – includes Keynote 3 and Pages 2.

Sibelius – great composition software. It's now up to version 4.

Audio Hijack Pro – nice little recording app.

Tags: work, macintosh

On an initial side note, I was planning on sticking something like this on my site (being a good Mac citizen and all), but the great site MacInTouch has beaten me to the punch. MacInTouch is a great first resource if you are experiencing technical difficulties with your Mac.

Speaking of technical difficulties, you know that presentation coming up this Friday? Well, early on in development, I realized my G3 PowerBook was not up to the task of running a Keynote presentation and demoing the iLife software in a manner that looked anything less than excruciating. Enter Dad's iBook – not an ideal machine for this job but better than the alternative.

The first order of business was putting in more RAM. It had 256MB, which, as any Mac OS X user will tell you, is less than you want to have. The first idea was to get another 256 MB module to bump up to 512 MB. The only problem was that no one around here seems to stock 256 MB RAM modules anymore, so we had to go with a 512 MB module, giving my father a grand total of 768 MB. Dandy.

With that out of the way, I was using his iBook at church to take notes when the screen began to freak out on me. Sometimes it would just die; other times, colored gibberish would streak around until it died. However, if we played around with the hinge, the picture might come back. Did I mention that this problem cropped up on Sunday – six days before the presentation?

Fast forward to Monday. It's apparent that this is a serious problem, so my wonderful wife trucks the iBook over to our local Apple Store (who treated her like an idiot, but that is another post for another day). The iBook has to be sent away to be worked on and won't be back for AT LEAST five days. Fortunately, my wife asked a question that would have never dawned on me: "Can we rent out a laptop?"

Thanks to her quick thinking, I have a G4 PowerBook to deliver the presentation with. Still, the Apple Store failed to throw in an ADC to VGA display adapter, but I fortunately have one because my G5 tower came with one. Let's just pray nothing else goes wrong between now and Friday.

Saturday, I'll write up a postmortem on how the presentation as a whole went.

Tags: work, technology

After 14 intensive hours of work, the DVD for the 5th grade completion ceremony is finished. As has been my practice for the las three years, no Microsoft products were harmed (read: used at all) for this product.

The Process

1. All photos of the children are organized in iPhoto and touched up or modified in Photoshop Elements 2.
2. The actual "slideshow" is put together in Keynote 2 and gets exported as a QuickTime movie.
3. Music was composed, orchestrated, and recorded in Sibelius 3 (with a little help from Audio Hijack).
4. Children's voiceovers are recorded in Audio Hijack. Both these voices and the music get imported and organized in to iTunes.
5. All media gets dumped into iMovie. Audio recordings are sorted through and added from within iMovie.
6. The whole package is exported to iDVD. A bonus slideshow is added from within iDVD. We burn, and DVD labels are created in Pages.

The Good

iPhoto is awesome. I organize everything image related in iPhoto – digital photographs, desktop pictures, stock photos. I love that program. Also, Keynote 2 is a great tool. I've discovered so many neat things about it during this last project. Apple's media browsers built into their iWork and iLife applications is also great. Since all of my audio was organized in iTunes, and all of the images were organized in iPhoto, all of my resources were no more than a click or two away – even if the application it was stored in was closed!

Getting away from Apple's products, Sibelius is really growing on me now that I am learning some more about it, but I have a long way to go. Now if only I could justify upgrading the instruments to Kontakt Player Gold! Also, Audio Hijack was great for recording the kids' voices. It also saved my tail once, and I'll talk about that further down in this post.

Also, Christine H. gets mentioned in the awesome category. She composed the beautiful music that went into this year's project. I merely acted as orchestrator and arranger.

The So-So

iMovie and iDVD were acting flakey this time around. For the first time, I began experiencing some slowdowns and unexpected terminations in iMovie, and iDVD got screwed up burning the first DVD and produced a coaster. I opened up my Process Viewer in OS X, and my CPU usage never maxed out, nor was I in any danger of running out of memory while iMovie was running. (Update: As far as iDVD goes, that coaster turned out to be my fault, so iDVD worked as well as expected.) I guess my main iDVD complaint is that I feel like I'm growing out of it.

The Bad

Things got rushed at the end, so there are still some details I am left unhappy with. That's my own fault. I did not pace myself as well this year as I have in previous years.

Keynote's "drop" slide transition did not translate well into video, and I wish I had made some time to compose some additional music for the extra slideshow. Another weird Keynote flaw was the "fly" transition: when I used it on an object (technically it's a text transition), it would leave artifacts only if the object was coming from the left side of the screen.

Finally, Sibelius was not behaving at all when I was trying to export the score as an audio track. It would always come out as an unreadable file. Fortunately, I was able to use Audio Hijack to record the music while it was playing, and that saved the day!

The End

Overall, the project went well. Now all that's left is duplicating a bunch of copies as parents order them. (I really need to invest in one of those disc duplicators before I fry my computer's optical drive!) The glitches seemed pretty random and isolated, and, overall, my "Made on a Mac" DVD was another relatively pain-free experience.

Product Links

• Apple iLife - includes iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, and GarageBand.
• Apple iWork - includes Keynote and Pages.
• Sibelius Software - makers of Sibelius 3 and distributors of Kontakt Player Silver and Gold.
• Rogue Amoeba - makers of Audio Hijack Pro.
• Adobe Photoshop Elements - less daunting and less expensive photo editing from the makers of Photoshop.

Tags: work, software