BETT Awards shortlist for Creative and Constructive Tools, iLife 06, Apple
Apple describe iLife ’06 as the easiest way to make the most out of every bit of your digital life. Using the Mac to collect, organize and edit the various elements. Transform them into mouth-watering masterpieces with Apple-designed templates. Then share the magic moments in beautiful books, colorful calendars, dazzling DVDs, perfect podcasts, and attractive online journals. All starring the users.
What's your experience of using this digital resource with pupils?
3 comments:
iLife 06 has made Podcasting in all its wonderous forms so easy. In its usual way Apple has managed to turn a complex idea into a simple process of drag and drop. They did this first with film editing, DVD creation, then digital photography, then audio and now the Web. It just works.
I forgot to say that in terms of using it in schools that there is minimal intervention needed and thus the teacher can concentrate on what is really important - the content
A question on Becta's SENIT email list asked about the comparison between Photostory on Windows, and iPhoto in iLife on the Mac. Here is the response I posted there, hope it's of interest here too.
I don't use Photostory so wondered if a list of the things I like about iPhoto might help in a comparison:
1 Plug any digital camera into the Mac and iPhoto will automatically start and flip straight to the import screen, waiting with a single highlighted button for you to confirm that you want to import the photos, and by default will automatically then clear them from your media card unless you choose to decline this feature. This is a great feature for users reducing mundane aspects of the task and allowing you to move forwards to making choices about what to do with the photos you've gone to the trouble of taking.
2 Having imported the photos, they are automatically selected as a group, giving the user the choice to either make an album from them, or by clicking on the Slideshow icon go straight into a display of them, with various default settings such as the Ken Burns effect which gives a sense of movement across the image if desired, and pleasingly simple dissolves between the images. Like everything else, you can customise all of this, but the default options mean that even without doing so you get a well presented set of photos straight away. This can be a great tool within a lesson for drawing things back together, or for 1:1 work where you want to encourage the child to reflect on what they have been doing.
3 Users can create their own albums or folders of as many albums as they want, and simply drag and drop images into those, then drag them into any order they like. None of these takes up any significant extra space as they are effectively just pointers to the single original images rather than repeat copies.
4 The edit tools are ridiculously easy to work with, yet give superb control of virtually all the kind of things most of us might consider buying another programme for. Crop (including several useful preset constrained options such as 4:3 etc), straighten (you have to see this in action to see just how good it is!), adjust colours, one click effects, one click "instant fix", brightness and contrast. You can even do all of these in full screen mode, thus removing the distractions of menu bars if that helps.
5 Not just brilliant integration with the other iLife programmes, but 3rd party ones such as Comic Life, which is a stunningly easy tool for composing pages using your photos in sequences. Obviously it's raison d'etre is to build comic pages, with captions and so on (all drag and drop and dead easy), but for lots of our pupils you can work with them to create simple sequences of images that don't have to have the full styling of professional looking comics with overlaying boxes etc. It's all in your hands and really really easy.
http://plasq.com/
6 Built in options about what you do with all of these photos. It's not just to store them, or even just to allow you to create personal folders to organise them. It encourages you to think more widely about going beyond just editing and selecting them, to share them. The DVD slideshow has already been mentioned, but other routes include making things like cards, calendars and books, all of which can be printed by the user at school if you don't want to use the online service to order professional quality versions. With one click the pupil can choose their favourite photo and make it their desktop image, and change it at will when they get bored. Or select one or several images and with one click send them as an email. The one click will automatically open up the email programme and place the photos in the message ready for you to decide who to send them to.
I'll happily drone on about the wonders of the other iLife apps but suspect you're all slumped over your screens already!
Post a Comment