Multimedia

South Portland has been fortunate to be a participant in the MLTI program for a number of years.   As a technology teacher, I would use MacBooks with my students when I taught our Video Productions course using iMovie.   I am predominantly a PC user so my remaining courses used my Dell windows lab for most of their assignments where they would use them for MS Office, the Internet, and Photoshop. 

Times have changed and along with it, last year we switched to each student having their own iPad and each teacher receiving a new iPad Mini and a Macbook Air laptop.  Teachers have worked hard at changing our curriculum to meet both MLR and Common Core Standards.   We also did lots of professional development work to advance students in their work of Quadrant B and D from Bloom's Taxonomy.     I found this transition to be an easy one for the most part since much of what my students have always done involved the creation of projects and conducting research for unknown variables.

This is the first year that I have spent more time using the iPad rather than only my PC lab.   One of the teachers in my department needs my windows-lab to teach Photoshop each semester which has required two of my sections in Career & College Explorations to use iPads.  Some of the projects I have had to adapt for these students and I learned with them how to overcome issues involved with them trying to make a copy of shared document templates to revise.

The year has been the most challenging one of my 29-year teaching career.  Not only did I have to move my entire computer lab at the end of our 33-month school construction in late December/early January but missed a number of days for doctor appointments relating to my foot and ankle.  February finally arrived and I have been home recovering from the surgery ever since with a predicted return date of March 23.  It certainly is different teaching and revising lessons from home while my sub does her best to use software and an iPad that she is not accustomed to using.  I have started creating some multimedia segments to try reviewing key steps in a project for my students to follow so that when I eventually return, will have to do less reteaching on particular units.  The struggle I am having is that many of the tasks my students do require Flash which the iPad is not capable of so instead I have resorted to slowly doing a project on the iPad while at the same time, typing verbatim steps and some screen shots for my sub to share with my students.

An interesting multimedia project my CCE students are currently doing is an Adult Interview which leads students through a 6-page questionnaire to learn what impact an individual's education, work experience, on-the-job training, changes over the years to our economy, the changes that have occurred due to technology, and the individual's encouragement (or discouragement) that they may have received from their own childhood to grown adult.   Students they create a narrative of the information including photos, voice over, and background music using iMovie.

I created the photo displayed for this week's blog using the free flowing photo app.

3-28-15
One of my favorite units was our projects with multimedia.   The unit gave me lots of new ideas on how to revise projects I currently do with my students as well as some new ones.  I'm going to also see if Tania and I can add some multimedia elements within how our Internship students report back to us weekly with their site logs.