home

=Welcome to the iLife in the Classroom Wiki!=

This wiki was started during the summer of 2007 in conjunction with a course from Doane College entitled "[|iLife in the Classroom]" taught by [|Katie Morrow] of [|O'Neill Public Schools]. I encourage educators to post their ideas for using the iLife suite in the classroom so that we all can learn from and share with each other.

=Overall Great iLife Ideas for Education=
 * Apple Learning Interchange: http://edcommunity.apple.com/ali/

=Comic Life= =iPhoto and PhotoBooth= =iTunes and Garage Band=
 * [|Comic Life Meets the Curriculum]: Great webpage with lots of elementary integration ideas and examples!
 * Stages of a butterfly's life cycle
 * "Five Senses": Capture a still photo of your eye, hand, mouth, nose, ear... put into a Comic Life collage with explanation of each of the 5 senses.
 * "The Important Book" by Margaret Wise Brown: Use as a model for "The Important Thing about Me." Use Comic Life to present back your Important stories as comic strips
 * "A Day in the Life of": Take a still photo of an inanimate, ordinary object (a shoe, a pencil, a trashcan, etc.) Share a first-person narrative from their perspective.
 * Find 3 additional ideas from a 5th grade teacher by visiting [|this webpage].
 * Steps in a series: for example, steps in a science experiment, events leading up to a historical event, etc.
 * Use Comic Life for students to start poems or short stories with visuals
 * I think Comic Life would be great when teaching the 6 Traits for writing. Kids could use pictures when writing about sentence fluency (for example). I think it would be great for them to also take the pictures of the things in their world that they will be writing about.
 * The students could pretend they are a famous person from history and use comic strip to introduce themselves to the class.
 * I think I could use comic life to teach vocabulary. Using the 4 square template the students could create study guides for their vocab words.
 * Students could make a cartoon version of a cell that they created with the living properties they learned about from our science vocabulary list. i.e. our science vocab list contains the prefix "rhodo" which means "red". The name of the organism they create must contain the prefix rhodo and the color red must be in the organism somewhere.
 * Comic Life would be good during social studies when studying the different states. Each student would be assigned a state and then create a few pages with facts and pictures about that state. (Examples: picture of state, state capital, state flower, state bird, state landmarks, etc.)
 * In science I could see them creating comics that illustrate what they think a situation would be like if some of the laws of nature they learn were different. They would need to understand how the law works in order to understand how a change would effect their environment
 * Comic Life would make a good presentation software for students to explain what happens in a book they have read.
 * Comic Life could be used as a condensed report on a famous person using the templates to contain images and text supporting important facts on that person, then have them present and post.
 * Have students choose a novel and create a comic strip that "acts out" a scene from the book, or better yet, create a whole chapter that is a comic strip rather than the typical chapter.
 * I could see using this in 4th grade social studies when we do states and capitals. They could find and narrate different facts about "their" states such as natural resources, capital, climate, etc. and make a comic about their state.
 * This would be great for students to use the first week of school as a new way to introduce themselves to their classmates
 * When a student is going to be missing school for an extended family trip I give them a journal to keep while they are gone. It would be neat to have them create a Comic Life booklet from the journal.
 * Our Kindergarten does a letter of the week: Use Comic Life to create pages for each letter along with digital camera pictures or downloaded images that begin with that letter's sound. Use the pages to create an alphabet book or use in the students' sound notebooks.
 * Comic Life is a great graphic organizer tool.
 * Introduce your "favorite" of some type of subject.
 * Students could give definitions, descriptions, and examples of different reading genres in fiction and nonfiction.
 * We could create a podcast of lectures and missed class activities for students that are unable to attend class do to sickness etc.
 * When we do our animal reports the kids could find photos and include facts about their animal.
 * Create a greeting card from one story book character to another. Why would they make good friends/partners/Valentines?
 * Historical Timeline Calendars: Choose a year... find photos from 12 top historical events that took place that year. Create an iPhoto calendar complete with annotations on various dates for when the actual events took place.
 * This would be a great way for the students to create either a weekly or monthly calendar for the elementary students and their parents.
 * I would like to use iphoto in math class to have students go into the community and take pictures of conic sections that they can find. I could also send health students out to take pictures of sites that promotes wellness in O'Neill.
 * NOUNS: Using a digital camera, students could walk around the school and take pictures of nouns. The pictures could then be imported to iPhoto. The students could then create a noun collage in Comic Life.
 * iPhoto would be wonderful to share pictures of places traveled to the students when they study a certain state or landmark in the United States. (Examples: Washington D.C., Mesa Verde, Grand Canyon, etc.)
 * Have students create community calendars that could be sold for fundraisers.
 * One can use iphoto as a year book for your classroom by taking photos of each other and writing their own autobiographies and then interview other teachers and administration as well as take their photos. Publish either hard back or as a pdf.
 * Have the students pick a famous landmark, battle, etc. and create a photo album of the area. It could also include maps as well.
 * Have kids write a Halloween story to go along with their "monster" faces.
 * Students can create a children's story book using iPhoto and putting in book form.
 * One of my prompts for writing class is called "My Jelly Story" for which my students write a story involving a family food episode at the dinner table or a restaurant, etc. Students could use iPhoto to build a slide show with pictures of the results.
 * Create a slideshow centered around a school event such as a parent involvement activity (Family Reading Night) or a classroom event (class field trip) using digital camera photos and photo booth pictures. Add text by creating it in Comic Life and moving it into iPhoto as a photo that could be added to the slideshow. Show at conferences or at Open House.
 * Students could take pictures of local government locations and community leaders when studying about their community. Then create a slideshow.
 * Kids could take photos of a lab activity and make an instructional handbook
 * An alphabet book like //C is For Cornhusker: A Nebraska Alphabet// by Rajean Luebs Shepherd could also be done in iPhoto but have it relate to your community.
 * Take photos in photobooth and have kids work on symmetry and angles.
 * At the end of the year, have the students use iPhoto to create a calendar of the year with topics related to each month.
 * I really enjoyed using comic life and have seen first hand what kids can do with this amazing software.
 * In Social Studies, iPhoto could be used to have students create books about a variety of topics. A couple of ideas for my curriculum include having them create a book about a Native American tribe including types of food, shelter, clothing, customs, etc. or about one of the 13 colonies including location, geography, leaders, government, why colonists settled here, and daily life.
 * Use photobooth to take pictures of kids with different emotions. Then let them write about when they feel that way.
 * Promote a book you have read by performing it as a newscast.
 * Create a playlist of audiobooks or language files or music without words, etc, etc.
 * Create 30 second or 60 second public service announcements (PSAs) to work on persuasive writing as well as safety/health topics
 * Create jingles-- the tune could imitate a familiar one, but the content would teach something... for example, a jingle of rules for the classroom, what we learned in class this year, a jingle for our school, a jingle for math facts, how to use the microscope, etc., etc.
 * Story Scenes: Students illustrate their story scenes in any program that you can export the scenes as images. They then create an enhanced podcast by recording the narrative of their story and adding in the scenes to the Podcast track to match the timings of their voice. Sound effects and background music are an added bonus. [|See Emily's story: "Sara and the Big Something"]
 * Expert Interviews or Voices from the Past: "What was school like when you were a kid?" "What do you remember from the Vietnam War?" "How did you become a dentist?" These interviews could be recorded using a digital voice recorder or via iChat or Skype, then compiled and edited in GarageBand.
 * Allow students to download podcast that relate to what is being taught in the classroom.
 * Choose a day when you know when you will need a sub. and create a podcast lesson that the sub could administer easily. Breaks can be built in for the times when you want the students to engage in an activity.
 * Create a podcast for parents with information about the 4th grade NE Fair.
 * Have the students research the conditions of a battle, time period, or major event in history and create a dialogue for an interview to describe the event to the class. Make it sound like a primary source.
 * students could take their own photos from a hobby, sport or pastime and put an inspirational podcast about how they are using their indv. gifts and talents, showing how everyone is unique and gain positive perspective from peers.
 * Have students choose a historic figure and create a podcast that makes students guess who and where the person is and where he/she is located. Keep creating podcast to give clues to the person's wearabouts.
 * Students could use the itunes and garage band to read a story they wrote for a writing prompt for scary stories, then share the stories with each other.
 * Create a podcast for students (and parents) with information about school staff so they can get to know them and the jobs they do at school. Have a different teacher or staff member on each episode.
 * Freshman girls are sometimes not comfortable giving their reports on an STD that is assigned to their group. I could have them make a podcast that the class could listen to.
 * I am going to use Podcasting for my students to read books and listen to their fluency.
 * Podcasting would be great for my students to take photos of the school and explain the lay out of the school to their parents.
 * Podcasting would be great for having the students work on their story-telling and creative writing and expression.
 * Students could do a podcast (as well as an iMovie) on the proper use of the microscope and slide preparation as their assessment if they did not want to do it in front of me. I could then review the podcast or iMovie.
 * Create podcasts that are trivia games or review questions. Even use the podcast for research reports instead of the written kind.
 * Students could use garage band to add some spice to their oral reading. This could be completed with short reading passages or short stories.
 * I have had a lot of fun using garage band and itunes this school year. The students really enjoy watching and listening to pod cast about their activties.
 * Students could use podcasting and GPS's to create a "hunt for living things". One team would give clues, photos, and global positioning of their journey and send another team to find their living thing.
 * To enhance the history of Scientists and their discoveries, students could podcast an interview with that scientist.
 * Students could create a "Super animal of the Year", using special adaptations and use podcasting to present the animal and give an acceptance speech to the committee for choosing their animal.
 * Students can create podcasts of facts from Science and Soc. units.

=iMovie and iDVD=
 * Digital storytelling experiences are a positive educational experience for students for a number of reasons. Topping the list may be VOICE-- finding their personal voice and sharing with others. Digital stories can take on many different shapes. Some examples are personal memoirs, expert interviews, oral histories, etc.
 * "My Emotions": Students take photos of different personal facial expressions then narrate what makes them feel that way or a time when they had that emotion.
 * Choose topics that affect the school, and have the students create a documentary movie. These movies can be used for peer support purposes, but also staff training as well.
 * Create an iMovie describing your classroom and showing highlights for next year's incoming class created by current students. Show on the first day of school.
 * Students in my sociology class could create videos about teen dating, teen suicide, or teen drug use. There are a lot of possibilities.
 * My students are going to use iMovie instead of PowerPoint to create projects in their classes.
 * I will "re-invent" a current project called "My Favorite Thing". The students have to write up a couple paragraphs to describe themselves, their family, etc. and in the conclusion, they take about their favorite thing to do, item, whatever. I will have the kids still write up the paragraphs, but they will the video themselves reading it, add in stills of their family members and/or their favorite thing.
 * As a performance assessment for our Sci-Fi unit my reading students write a short skit/play from their selected books/short stories. They could film out of sequence & edit the skit imovie. This would help those not interested in performing live. I would also have my students create a movie about our clean-up day at the park AND have the Jr. Council do a movie about Meals on Wheels.
 * I would love to make iMovies of lab activities or maybe create a video portfolio of the kids work.
 * Students could make movies about African Americans, Presidents, or famous women and their contributions to United States history.
 * Students can explore figurative language by making objects, events or characters into metaphors in iMovie with pictures, text and sound.
 * Students perform a readers theater and video record themselves and then edit their performance through imovie by adding effects, themes, etc.
 * I could edit the gymnastics routines and send them to parents to watch their daughter's routine.
 * Create an iMovie that allows students to interview veterans and then create a movie to honor them and their service to our country.
 * I am going to use imovie to create an elementary yearbook through students' views.
 * I movie is just another creative way of sharing information and having fun learning.
 * iMovie could be used to create advertisement videos. A specific project I've done in the past is to have students create advertisements encouraging settlers to move west during the time of Westward Expansion of the U.S. iMovie would work great for this.

= = =iWeb= = = =General/Integration Ideas=
 * "Planetary MySpace" or "Mathematicians MySpace" or some other variation: Each student takes on the identity of a planet or a famous mathematician or whatever the theme is. They use iWeb to create a personal "MySpace" page as if their "character" was creating a web presence for themselves to connect with others. Favorite music? Common friends? Free time fun? All are great topics when putting oneself in someone else's point of view.
 * Create a book blog that serves as a journaling assignment. Students can post and reply to others for a certain number of points. Colleges do this and it would be a great way for students to "chat" about what they are reading rather than the typical discussion in class.
 * Create a website that kids could access to get teacher lesson plans and lectures from classes they've missed
 * Great communication tool for parents
 * An elementary website that is updated once a week.
 * I was thinking that I could set up a spot on my website for the students to answer questions about the book that we are going to read in class. This will make the students use my website and become used to going there so they can find other things that I put on there.
 * Create a website for my classroom that I could update with current projects, photos, schedules, etc.
 * //Ideas that use more than one part of the iLife Suite or don't seem to fit in the other categories but are still worth mentioning!//
 * iLife in Education award winning entries from several years ago.... good idea-starters: [|http://www.apple.com/education/ilifeawards/]
 * Also be sure to check out [|Remote Control Helicopter]