Software+Programs

=Software Programs = toc

//Learn about some of the tools that are available to in our district to use that are already installed in our labs, carts, or teacher machines //

Animation-ish
//(Available only in Elementary School computer lab.) //

Created by Peter H. Reynolds, NYTimes Bestselling Author/Illustrator, Animation-ish can have students drawings up & moving in minutes. Animation-ish lets students creativitly design their own animations simply & easily. It enables children to “show what they know.” It can liven-up a lesson, & improve understanding through visual representation.
 * Create animations for,Integrate creativity across the curriculum
 * Movies, greeting cards, websites, presentations, & vocabulary
 * Boosts technology literacy skills
 * Supports beginner web-authoring skills & graphic design

Comic Life
Key Benefits of Using Comics in Education
 * A great visual representation of knowledge
 * Presents what is essential
 * Easier to remember information associated with a visual graphic
 * Perfect avenue for writing dialogue
 * Incites students with low interest in writing
 * Helps organization through storytelling & storyboarding
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Using visual images convey meaning to a story or topic
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Develops creative & higher level thought processes
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Sequencing promotes understanding

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">To use Comic Life, first drag in your pictures, captions, lettering & speech. A built-in iPhoto & Finder image browser makes it easy to find the images you’re looking for. It is also easy to add images from digital cameras, the Web, clip art, along with scanned photos, & drawings. There is a large library of pre-made templates styles & fonts to choose from. Have some fun, by adding bendable comic lettering text, which makes great headings & titles for files created with other programs. Easily share you work with JPEG & HTML exports, so you can share on your website, blog, or email.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">GarageBand
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">GarageBand is a multi-track recording application that is loaded on all teacher & student computers, labs, & mobile carts. It contains a complete collection of audio tools, which easily allows you to write a song, record real audio pieces, play with software instruments, create parts using Apple loops, add sound effects, & mix your music.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Included are Apple loops that are professionally recorded short performances you can use in your songs. Click a loop, listen, if you like it, drag it into your project. You can piece loops together to create complete songs.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">To make it even simpler, Magic GarageBand allows you a fun way to quickly create songs in various styles that you can add your own parts to. Export the songs you make to your iTunes library so you can listen to them on your iPod, iPhone, iPad, or share them with everyone.

//(<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">A teacher guest post by Mr. Konrad, High School Music Teacher) //
 * <span style="color: #0000ff; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Teacher Guest Post **

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">I know I know…the music teacher’s going to talk about GarageBand. I am sure you have all now been floored, so once you pick yourself off the ground, I want to discuss some of the uses I have found with this great application. There are certainly many more-advanced recording applications out there, but I have found GarageBand to be extremely efficient when it comes to recording my student music groups, creating projects for my music appreciation course, or even cutting and editing recordings. The interface is extremely user-friendly and I have found that most any student can figure out functions pretty quickly. Since most Apple computers come with GarageBand, most everyone in our district have access to this program. I’ll discuss below two ways I’ve used this program, one more traditionally for music groups, one more versatile for other classrooms.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Probably the most straightforward use is for simple recording. My students are expected to evaluate themselves as musicians and one of the easiest ways is to actually hear what they sound like. Since I cannot transplant their ears temporarily, I can simply record a rehearsal or run through of a piece and have them listen back, actively listening for areas in need of improvement or exceptionally positive moments to reinforce. Because of GarageBand’s simple exporting, I can easily create an mp3/AAC file so my students can access these files from anywhere. Now, audio recording and self-evaluating your class works well for primarily music groups (although it is certainly not limited to that), there are other more versatile uses. My music appreciation students are asked to create radio program. In actuality, they’re creating a podcast, but (even nowadays) they tend to better relate to what they might hear on morning radio or from evening DJs. I’ll have them record intros, news segments, weather updates, sport check-ins, commercials, as well as the morning-zooesque sound effect drop-ins and musical features we all know. My most recent project asked my students to do the above as if they were reporting from the Renaissance era (we were discussing Renaissance music at the time). Students had on period composers and interviewed them (students played the roles) about their works and life. I find that I can reinforce knowledge without making the work seem like drudgery. It’s a fun assignment and students can work on multiple parts at once (if in large groups) and then combine the media files into one. It’s a versatile assignment too and one I highly recommend for all content areas.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">iMovie
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">//Tips & Tricks when using iMovie//

iMovie is a Apple's video creation software. Here are some tips & tricks when using iMovie.


 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">Get a handy pop-up menu by holding down the //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">Control //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;"> key while clicking the mouse on an area.


 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">Changes can be done to multiple clips with shortcuts. First alter one clip, copy it when you’re done. Then select all the clips within the project you’d like to change, go to //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">Edit > Paste Adjustments //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;"> & choose the type of adjustment you’d like to apply. Once done, all your selected clips will have been modified.


 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">The **<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">Ken Burns **<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;"> effect can now be added to video clips as well as still images. It’s a great way to add some motion to a static shot & make it more interesting.


 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">What can be done with the extra video footage? Importing it into iMovie is an option, but it gets converted to a format that takes up a lot of space. One option to avoid this is to save your media in its original format.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Connect your camera & go to iMovie’s Import window.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Bottom left of the interface is an Archive All button.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Select it & iMovie will save the entire content of your camera into a special file.


 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">In the future, when you’re ready to import your clips into an iMovie event: go to //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">File > Import > Camera Archive //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;"> & select that file.


 * **<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">Crop Video in iMovie **<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;"> – Click //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">Cropping & Rotation //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;"> button under the viewer window. Drag the edges of the green box of the video to crop the section. This gets the focus on action in your footage & remove unwanted background.


 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">For iMovie’s advanced tools go to //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">iMovie > Preferences //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">. In the General section click //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">Show Advanced Tools //<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">. The toolbar will expand to include new icons.


 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">Put a clip on top of another clip & a menu box will appear with several more tools now available. For example,
 * **<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">Green Screen Effect **<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;"> – Shoot a video with a single colored background (often green or blue), iMovie allows you to make that color transparent. You can replace the background with any other video clip, graphic or still image. It’s easy to superimpose anything into any shot.
 * **<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">Cutaway **<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;"> – Drag one clip on top of another & create a cutaway. The new clip is superimposed on top of the existing one. When you bring up the Inspector on the cutaway clip, a new opacity slider lets you adjust how transparent the clip appears.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">iPhoto
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">iPhoto offers many ways to enhance & share digital photos. Photos can be quickly imported, organized, improved, enhanced, & printed. Use iPhoto to create slideshows, books, calendars, & cards. Photos can be emailed or used as screensavers & published to photo albums.


 * <span style="color: #0000ff; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Organizing Your Photos **

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">iPhoto displays photos in the order in which they are imported into the program. To quickly display only the most recent photos, click the //Last Import// icon in the //Recent// list. Photos can be viewed in the photo library by sorting them in a variety of ways.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Photos can be grouped into albums to better organize the photo library, put together the photos needed to burn to a CD or DVD, or choose the pictures to publish on a webpage. An album can be a temporary holding place for a group of photos until they are needed for a slideshow, book, or calendar. Photos in the photo library are not affected by moving them into or out of albums.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">In a slideshow, photos appear one at a time, in succession & can be arranged in any order. Before playing a slideshow, background music can be inserted, display duration set for each slide, transitions added between the slides, & other options can be set for a fantastic slideshow!


 * <span style="color: #0000ff; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Editing and Special Effects **

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Pictures can be cropped to establish a needed certain size. iPhoto has several enhancements that can be added to the photos. Colors may be boosted in a washed-out image, toned down in a picture that is too bright, or have the edges blurred for a special effect on a photo.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Use the built-in iPhoto Help guide to get more in depth & use iPhoto like a pro!

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Photo Booth
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Photo Booth is a fun application that makes it easy to take photos & create videos using the built-in camera in your Mac.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Effects can be applied by clicking on the "Effects" button when taking a photo or by taping a video. In addition, users can apply backdrops. These provide an effect similar to a green screen. When a backdrop is selected, a message appears telling the user to step away from the camera. Once the background is analyzed, the user steps back in front of the camera & is shown in front of the chosen backdrop.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Videos & photos can be easily imported into most other documents. A great way to have students create a fun podcast.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Ideas for the classroom,
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Make a movie of your students as they read out loud. Do this a couple times through out the year. You can use the videos to show how their reading has improved through out the year.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Use the mirror effect to show symmetry.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Students can use video to create daily announcements or a special newscast. Use a photo of the school as the background.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Make a short video reinforcing concepts learned in class. Post them on a class web page to be used as homework help.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Take a picture of each student & create a class directory or seating chart.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Allow students to use the video to do a book review or report.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Podcasting
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Much like journals and diaries, podcasts allow students to express their opinions & share their experiences with others. Podcasts are designed to be broadcasted to a larger audience, whether shared with the class, the school or the world. Podcasts are digital recordings made available using a "feed" for others to listen. They are great ways to spread the news & to demonstrate what students have learned.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Examples –
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Students could produce a series of podcasts as they read through a chapter book, giving their impressions of the book.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Students produce a podcast after finishing a book for class.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Steps to creating a podcast,
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Plan: Write the script. This is the most important & sometimes the most time consuming part of the process.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Produce: Record the audio using GarageBand. You may also include images to enhance the podcast.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Edit: Trim the audio, add music in the beginning & the end.
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Publish: Export the GarageBand file to iTunes. From iTunes you can export the file as an MP3 which can be uploaded to a website, CD, iPod… to make it available for sharing.