iMovie Club pt.2

iMovie club this week included a foray into the wonderful world of music video creation. I showed an example of what you can do with just an iSight camera and then talked children through importing CDs into iTunes and downloading YouTube videos (thanks to ClickToFlash).

The technique basically was to start recording iSight video using iMovie, play the song in iTunes and then mime along to the song. You then put the resulting video into the timeline and then add the audio of the original song as the background sound. A double-click on the video lets you turn down the audio thus leaving just the CD audio. If you use the precision editor you can then slide the video back and forth until the miming syncs up with the audio. (Using a clapperboard would make this a lot easier, so maybe I’ll try that next time.)

Once the basics of the track was laid down, children could then import downloaded YouTube videos into iMovie and then select interesting clips to insert over the song. If you enable the advance tools in the preferences, you can insert a cutaway by dragging a clip onto an existing video clip in the project. This keeps the audio and the mimed video in sync between cutaways – it’s a pretty cool feature!

It did take quite a lot of one-to-one support from me, so hopefully next week children will feel more confident to continue creating their music videos and exploring

Lion installs

Today I had the fun job of updating 3 Macs to Lion. Fun!

It was actually pretty straightforward. The update installed in under an hour and seemed to work fine. But the more important part was that the drivers for our touchscreen LCD displays now work. Yay. It’s a shame it’s taken 5 months sort out. The only setting I had to fix was that Lion turns on fast user switching by default.

Hopefully the job of doing the rest of the school come April shouldn’t be too bad!

Munki Munki Munki

When wandering around school, my heart is warmed whenever I see a Mac quietly updating itself via the unassuming genius that is Munki. (Yes, I know that I am a geek!) Usually it’s only the latest iTunes release, but even that is helpful, if only to prevent a ‘download update?’ nag screen for the user.

The only main sticking point has been with the Mac Minis that teachers use. These tend to be on all day long with very little time sitting on the login screen, which is the only time I’ve set Munki to run. I’ve set the Macs, via managed preferences, to turn themselves on at the weekend, which does help with most. The problem comes when one of the updates fail, leaving that machine increasingly behind on its update schedule. The only solution for that is to manually sit there with the computer and run a few updates at a time until it gets past the dodgy package. Whilst being a minor pain, it’s much more preferable that sending a UNIX command with Apple Remote Desktop every half-term holiday and spending a morning making sure everything has updated properly.

Thoughts on iBooks

Apple’s announcement this week about iBooks 2, iTunes U and iBooks Author was very interesting. Fraser Speirs has written a good article about it over at Macworld discussing it all.

Here are my thoughts:

Having a school of Macs puts us in a very good position to take advantage of all this stuff if and when we get iPads.
iBooks Author is remarkably like Pages and Keynote. Really must do some staff training on iWork to get people used to them…
I’m already intrigued about using Wiki Server to distribute ePub documents to students and so the ability to create interactive e-textbooks becomes a lot more interesting and useful.
iTunes U is definitely something to be looked into, especially if it can replace features of a VLE. More investigation needed.
I wonder how we are meant to install iBooks Author across a network? I don’t fancy setting up a iTunes account for every machine in the school.

Wiki Server = no Fronter?

Now here’s a thought. Has Wiki Server on OSX Server basically got all it takes to do away with Fronter (our wonderful pan-London VLE via LGfL)? I think it just might…

It can do pages that are easy to edit
You could put a message board on as a blog?
You can do calendaring
It has the huge advantage that you don’t need to log in when in school to use it

Certainly worth some consideration anyway.

Apple European Education Leadership Summit

It sounds a pretty impressive title, and it was a pretty impressive day! Epic location – St Pancras Renaissance Hotel – and usual Apple polish and detail. But it was a very useful and interesting day, with big and small session input, discussions with schools and even presentations from kids using iPads about their learning (very startling that one!)

Apple TV

I think the Apple TV was the secret star of the show, effortlessly allowing iPad screens to be mirrored to any projected surface or TV. This sets the iPad free to become a genuinely useful tool to teach from, share children’s work and all kinds of other things. Lots of interest in this. And it’s remarkably, remarkably cheap. I feel that the rip-off days of the ‘Interactive-if-you’re-lucky-whiteboard’ are numbered.

The ecosystem (the ‘glue’)

A guy called Abdul Chohan from a secondary academy called ‘ESSA’ in Bolton had an amazing story to tell. The school he worked at had something like 55% of pupils achieving 5 A*-C at GCSE. Not great. Something had to be done. So he bought an iPod touch for every student. That, plus lots of other changes, saw the now academy turned around and they now have 100% achieving at least 5 A*-Cs. It’s not magic but technology plays a huge part in it. They now have a purpose-build new campus with technology everywhere. It looks like a stunning place.

The really interesting part came though when he talked about the apple ecosystem (the ‘glue’ – mac/iPod/iPad). In a workshop, he showed us the wiki server that they use to deliver all their lessons. Pupils log on using their iPod touches and then download any resources required, such as ePub documents that can be viewed in iBooks anytime (no Internet connection required). I’ve used the wiki server at school for our ICT club but I never seriously thought of using it to replace a VLE…

Shoes-off Learning

There was also this guy called Stephen Heppell who talked about lots things he’d seen in technology over the world. One thing he mentioned was where classrooms were ‘shoes off’ (mainly in Scandinavian places) which hugely helped children’s learning and behaviour. Apparently it helps kids feel more like they’re at home and so are more relaxed and engaged. Worth a try sometime…?

He also talked about a thing Apple do called Challenged Based Learning. Worth a look too.

Anyway, that’ll do for now. Brain very buzzing!

BETT Brewings

Just got back from BETT so thought I would share some of my observations and thoughts.

Insane numbers of new ‘Interactive Whiteboards’ were on offer. Some boasted the ability to interact on any projected surface, others were just enormous touchscreen LCD displays. Perhaps the ‘SMART’ stranglehold is loosening? Certainly the market seems ripe for disruption.
Many stalls were running Macs, even if not particularly selling Apple products. Saw quite a few Keynote presentations running too…
iPads seemed to be the prize of choice in competitions.
Not a huge amount of software on sale but certainly lots of ‘cloud’ or web offerings.
Multiple laptop/iPad trolleys/flight cases. Expensive though!

We also visited several demos of iPads and what you can do with them. There are lots of cool apps out there that I didn’t know about so will hopefully get to try them out soon. 1-1 deployment seems to be the holy grail, but many schools are settling for a class set that can be shared around a school. The demos were not always of the highest quality though; perhaps I’m spoilt by watching too many flawless Stevenote software demos?

Wireless access for iPads is an important consideration as well. Running a couple of devices from a cheap wifi point is one things, but 30 devices trying to access the network is a whole new ball game. It seems like it is very easy to spend £10k on doing the job properly! Needs more research…

I am interested what else I’ll learn at the Apple Education Summit tomorrow. It will certainly be fun to try things out!

Lion and interactive whiteboards

Today I made the happy discovery that even our aged 580 series Smartboards work with Lion. Yay! Our school has been gradually buying Smartboards over the last decade, which means some classrooms have some very antique models (with serial to USB cables and the old-style round erasers. I once rang Smart’s UK technical support about one of these boards and they were in complete shock that they still worked at all…). I was not looking forward to paying thousands to replace them when we either bought new Lion Macs or upgraded from Snow Leopard.

Smart still claim that OSX 10.7 isn’t officially supported by their Notebook software, but they have released a patch that fixes things up well enough.

London Mail made useful!

LGfL (London Grid for Learning) offer a wide variety of services for schools, including a Microsoft-hosted ‘London Mail’ for use by children in schools. This includes features such as ‘safe mail’ where you can control who the user can send and receive email with.

The only problem is that it requires children to remember their USO login details to access it, which is not the most memorable string of letters and numbers in the world. My experience is that email for children is therefore often underused in the classroom.

At our school we’re running a trial classroom with an emphasis on more independent learning. Part of this was to email work to groups of children that they can then access at one of the classroom iMacs. But with email access requiring putting in obscure usernames and passwords and visiting obtuse websites, it never really happened.

Whilst perusing LGfL’s website, I discovered a new section about London Mail where they promised access for smartphones and with Outlook, so I contacted Atomwide and they sent me the login details.

It requires Outlook IMAP access, which can be done natively in Apple’s Mail, and was very easy to sort out. Now one child just has to log onto one of the iMacs and open Mail – easy!

For this interested, here are the server details:

username: uso.account@lgflmail.net
Incoming hostname: imap.outlook.com
Outgoing hostname: amsprd0102.outlook.com

Munki and automatic updates

Apple’s approach to software updates betrays their consumer-centric view of computing: on a Windows PC, updates can be set to automatically install and in fact your system administrator can take that power off you and install updates whether you like it or not; on the Mac, it’s up to the user to install updates when they want to, and there are no official ways to fully automate this process.

This is all very well, but is a bit of a pain when managing a school-full of Macs, especially when all the remaining PCs happily pull updates off the Windows Software Update Service without anyone lifting a finger. In a bid to keep everything reasonably up to date, I would use Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) to send a UNIX command to run software update every now and again. This worked reasonably well, but required each machine to be unoccupied and for me to keep an eye to check everything was working ok. I also tried setting machines to wake up in the night and then scheduled ARD to send the update command at that time, but this would never quite work properly with machines losing their connection or going to sleep etc.

I then stumbled upon a program called Munki, which describes itself as ‘Managed software installation for OSX’. It’s a pretty powerful bit of software, but with quite a steep learning curve and no friendly GUI to get things going. However, after a bit of reading of the help files I realised that it could quite easily be set up to automatically install software updates whenever the Mac was idle at the login screen. Here’s how (using a Mac OSX Server to manage preferences):

Install the Munki package on a Mac.
Open Workgroup Manager and then add a managed preference, using the ‘Managed Software Update’ application to provide an MCX .plist manifest.
Add the following keys:

AppleSoftwareUpdatesOnly = true
InstallAppleSoftwareUpdates = true
SoftwareUpdateServerURL = your own Apple Software Update Server or just leave blank to use Apple’s
SuppressUserNotification = true

Tada, it should work!

Unfortunately for me it didn’t, not straightaway. It turned out that I was having problems with our Software Update on our Mac server because the DNS wasn’t sorted correctly. A useful tool in terminal is ‘changeip’ for that…

But it all seems to be working now. Hurrah.