My district recently has built a Mac Lab in our middle school. I have been working in a PLC to help define the space, build templates and guidelines on how it should be used and test the equipment. It’s a wonderfully exciting venture but slightly daunting at the same time. Many of our meetings so far have been obtuse, I believe because there are so many possibilities and questions we are all having troubling focusing on just what needs to be addressed first.
How will this lab offer different possibilities to our students than the traditional computer labs we currently have with PCs?
Many of us are interested in having our students use I-movie to create short videos projects. As a French teacher – rather than having students perform their dialogues in front of the class in French they could film and edit them in I-movie. However we’ve learned that the students may spend 2 periods on the French and then several days in the lab doing the shooting, editing, etc. How do we compromise the time taken away from content instruction?
One of the primary goals in my classroom as a French teacher is to encourage my students to talk to one another in French. My district has long advocated using video-conferencing but I recently Skyped for the first time with friend (put that on the list of new things lately along with blogging, twitter, RSS, etc). I realized that the Mac Lab creates the opportunity for children to Skype with children in other classrooms. How cool would that be to motivate students?! In one of our discussions the head of technology mentioned that “chatting” in not permitted within the district. How can we manage chatting to make it a safe tool we can use to help children learn a new language?
amyvonsauer 