Apple - Education - Apple Learning Tour

Apple - Education - Apple Learning Tour.

I had the opportunity to attend Apple's hands-on events that were held in the Chicago area the past two days. If you're interested in experiencing Apple technologies for yourself, check the learning tour site for additional dates and locations. This event will be repeated in Rosemont, Illinois, in January. I highly recommend the Apple Learning Tour because it gives you the opportunity to be a student yourself, producing multimedia in a curricular context. People wonder why Apple doesn't have much of a presence at conferences these days... my guess is that these kinds of immersive experiences are much more effective for helping educators understand the true power of technology. 

I came away from these workshops with lots of ideas for using iLife and iWork  in classrooms. I'm particularly excited about publishing work created in Apple's iWork suite in ePub format, which is the file format supported by Apple's iBook app on iPods and iPads. You can take any Keynote, Numbers, or Pages document and then export it to ePub format under the Share menu. Then, drag that file into iTunes so that it imports into your iTune library (it goes under Books, I believe) and then sync your iPad or iPod. Under your iBook app, you'll be able to browse through your presentation or document. I knew that there were lots of possibilities for publishing in this manner, but I just haven't gotten around to exploring this concept until now. Think about having a class do group projects and then you sync all the reports to your class set of iPads, and the kids can take look at each other's work this way. Pretty nifty. 

Also, keep in mind that you can drop videos that kids have created in Photo Booth or iMovie right into a Pages document. Also, consider creating project templates for kids to use that include the elements that you want for the project. For instance, make templates for journal entries, lab reports, etc. 

Another thought that I think crossed a lot of participants' minds is that each kid ideally needs their own device. The price point of an iPad is reasonable, but a more compelling reason is there is so much that can be done to personalize learning on iPads. Specifically, it's ideal to have kids reading novels on iPads and along with this, taking notes and highlighting important passages. Annotations are really a personal thing... how would you handle this if classes had sets to share? if your class sets of iPads were re-synced each night to refresh for other classes and those notes were potentially erased?

Finally, we looked at a bunch of apps that were amazing. I always come away from these events with a long list of apps that I want to download, and in some cases, purchase. One favorite that I tried out with my son tonight was a book app called Milly, Molly and the Bike Ride by Kiwa Media, which seems to make additional books and apps. It reminds me very much of Scholastic's Wiggle Works program because kids can have the book read to them or can record themselves reading. Henry and I also enjoyed a Encyclopedia Kids app on volcanoes... they also make the Egyptian history one featured today at the learning tour and another on dinosaurs. Encyclopedia Britannica Kids Volcanoes is really a rich source of content including puzzles, quizzes, and tons of videos of real volcanoes. This is right up Henry's alley and I suspect we'll be purchasing the other two apps made by this company. We also purchased a Flat Stanley app which I totally love and I've uploaded the picture Henry made to this blog. Henry had fun writing the caption on this year old picture and sending via our iPad to my husband, Julia, and my dad. Other apps that I purchased that I still need to check out include Math Bingo, NineGaps, and Inkling, which is a textbook reader for lack of a better term.

By the way, other has other education events at various locations and online. Check out their offerings here. 

 

Comments

[adam]

Nice post.Thank you for sharing your experience.....