It ‘Just Works’

The latest point update to OSX 10.7 was released last week and I was pleasantly surprised today to discover that all of the Lion machines had already updated themselves thanks to Munki.

I know this is not the most exciting news in the world, but I was happy to see it as our Mac server is only running 10.6 and had to be fiddled with to get it to dish up Lion updates. I followed Apple’s instructions on how to do this but at first I didn’t think it had worked. Now I guess it was just caching them all as Lion clients now seem to be happily updating themselves. Yay!

I guess that now frees up my half term to do the LGfL 2.0 switchover with our trusty IT technician Ji. Looking forward to that job…

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

iLife & iWork training

The staff meeting today was on ICT and we decided that it would be good to introduce staff to some more Apple software.  It always pains me when I see Microsoft Word being used so prolifically, especially as it’s probably one of the worse pieces of Mac software out there and because there is so much better stuff to use!

We started off with a look at iPhoto, which went down well.  It was slightly embarrassing that iPhoto decided to throw up a ‘I won’t print because I don’t have any themes installed’ error.  Really should have checked that!

This was followed by a look at Keynote, which is always fun.  Instant Alpha got a few cheers as did the various cool transitions.  We then looked at Pages, highlighting how it’s easy to create things like newsletters or brochures with children.  Unfortunately my secret source of certificate templates was also discovered…rats!

We rounded off with a look at Garageband, focusing on using loops and making podcasts.  It is remarkably easy to use and I’m looking forward to hearing all the things children are creating.  Headphones for the ICT suite definitely needs to go on the next bid though!

It generally all seemed to go down well, with staff engaged and enthused by the new possibilities.

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.

Primary Computer Science

I’m not opposed to Gove’s position that students should be learning how to program in schools, but what does that look like in a Primary? The thought of designing an iOS app seems pretty appealing, but then you open up Xcode and realise that Objective C isn’t entirely drag’n’drop. Where do we begin? What does progression look like? Here are some thoughts:

  • The oft-ignored and maligned ‘control’ part of the curriculum is probably the best place to start. BeeBots then lead onto Logo and learning to program a moving robot. If teachers knew how this was actually useful in the future (well for the coders of tomorrow anyway) then perhaps it would have more of a place in the school year.
  • LEGO Mindstorms is the natural successor to this, offering more advanced control features and programming opportunities. Best put that is my April bid then!
  • Purple Mash from 2Simple has a really cool ‘3D Game Maker’, which lets you design simple DOOM-like levels (albeit without fireball-throwing imps to contend with). This would be a good place to start when thinking about programming and designing a game or app.
  • Maybe I should learn Obj-C and run an Xcode club after school? I’m not sure how easy that would be…any thoughts?

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.

iMovie Club

I’ve just done an after school club today that I actually enjoyed! It was a ‘iMovie Club’, making use of a suite of iMacs and my misspent youth making short films.

The club is with a lovely bunch of motivated Year 5&6 kids and today we had a go at making spoof news programmes. We used Photo Booth to shoot the footage, dropping in location shots pulled from Google in the background, thus transporting kids from the news studio around the globe. They then imported these clips into iMovie and started editing from there.

It was only the first session, but I was really pleased with how confident many of the children were with the iMacs. Most KS2 kids will have done some sort of video project over the last year and it definitely showed. I’m looking forward to what gets produced over the term!