Weekly blog intro: duck feathers and documentaries to Airserver and iMovie

This week's blog entry is entitled "duck feathers and documentaries to Airserver and iMovie". I intentionally put duck feathers and documentaries in the front to illustrate that "it's not about the tool", it's what you want to accomplish. In this case a teacher at South Elementary wanted to simply display images of duck feathers from a magazine a student brought in and tie it back into the curriculum he was teaching. He used the Airserver tool to accomplish this. Another teacher wanted students to create a video about an historical figure using video and still images. To accomplish this, she used iMovie. In the blog entries below I have embedded those testimonials as well as simple tutorials on each of these tools. I hope you enjoy.

Duck feathers and Airserver

Have you ever wanted to show student work with your projector and still be completely mobile in the classroom? Then Airserver may be a useful tool for you. The Airserver software allows you to display your ipad through your projector. This can be very useful in demonstrating apps, working together on an app, showing youtube videos and being able to pause as you walk around the classroom (proximity classroom management), or displaying student work. The software itself actually allows you to project up to 5 ipads at one time, which could be useful in comparing student projects or building a group visual collage. Below is a short testimonial of a second grade teacher using Airserver to simply project images from a magazine a student had using the educreation app... a simple and effective means of showing content that the students identified. By using educreations, you could also annotate on the image itself. See the upcoming blog post on educreations :)Below that video is a short tutorial on how to access and use Airserver and how to set your computer and ipad for optimal use.

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Duck feathers and Airserver: a testimonial





Airserver tutorial and optimal set-up

Historical Figure Documentaries and iMovie

People are what shape and define history. Within the Minnesota State Standards for Social Studies alone, the term "historical figure" is denoted seventeen different times and the word "people" over forty different times. With such an emphasis on people and history ,it is no wonder that students are consistently asked to create projects and write papers about significant historical figures. One way to meet multiple standards,engage students, and climb that elusive ladder of Bloom's Taxonomy is to offer students a means of creation. One tool (there are others) that can help achieve this is iMovie. iMovie is a powerful video editing software that can be used on a Mac, ipad, ipad mini, and iphone. Below is a short testimonial of how Shannon Ahrens, middle school computer applications teacher utilized iMovie to create a documentary of historical figures. Below that video is a short tutorial on how to make a simple movie. Enjoy :)

iMovie in the middle school





iMovie App tutorial