I am so very excited about my recent purchase of a new MacBook! As a former PC user, I am totally impressed with the simplicity and speed of this machine. I am very curious to hear from other teachers--or even others with Macs in general--who know of great programs or features that would be useful in the classroom. I'm a high school English teacher and was curious about the things this baby can really do!
Hey Tubalores,
I do quite a lot of work in didactics for my local university and we do use Macs quite often. Just a couple of quick things that come to mind:
I know a guy who does some research in teaching lyrics by letting the students record poems and then add sound effects to create the right mood and hence understand the intentions of the author. Garageband is quite good for that, and it comes with your Mac.
If you want to get into Dramas, you can have your students act out scenes and use a camera to capture that (be careful on parent notification and all the signatures you need for that). Scenic interpretation is an awesome approach to get your students to understand the intensions of the characters and the setting of the play. Now if you want to take this one step further, use a Shakespeare play for instance and let the students reenact this in a modern day setting. Make a quick movie about it. The kids will love it and they will about the timeless value of literature (just think about the Romeo and Julia film with Di Caprio that was on a couple of years ago). You can cut basic movies with iMovie (it's real easy too).
Something else I have tried when teaching rhetorics was having the students read lines to a scene from a sitcom, stand-up comedian or something like it. You can take out the audio track and have the students speak for the actors (pronunciation and intonation is mostly quite good on sitcoms). If you also teach another language, you can also have them write the translation and then record it (I did that once with an ep. form King of Queens, the kids loved it and learned about grammar without realizing it).
Use mpeg streamclip to chop up movies that you ripped with handbrake and let the students compare different movies, let them work out plots or analyze linguistic features (by doing that you can actually teach them about understanding and 'reading' film; with kids watching quite a lot of TV nowadays, that's not a bad thing).
To sum up: iLife is quite a handy tool that makes it easy to use media in your classroom. That makes your lessons more interesting and more fun.
Make sure you put handbrake (free) and MPEG Streamclip (free) on there too so that you can Rip Movies with Handbrake and maybe transcode them with MPEG Streamclip. (By the way: you can also download youtube Clips with Mpeg Streamclip)
If you have a library close to where you live or your school offers access to the MLA bibliography, you can search it for media integration into the language classroom. There is tons of material on there (totally legal) that shows you how to work with media.
Hope that helps you .)
