Yikes! Holidays

We've really attacked the MAC's this week and it's been FANTASTIC! Today we're going to revisit the Inspector, he's so helpful, and tidy up our loose ends, like publishing our pages onto our blogs etc. Yesterday was a big day videoing and so there was no time to post to this blog. But later today there'll be a couple of videos to watch and a write up. The best thing I've liked about MAC ATTACK week is how the interactiveness of the software has created friends amongst the group . It has come to our attention that we need to branch off into two areas with the programme: 5-7 year olds and 8-14 year olds. The younger children need more specialised care and a slightly modified programme to cater to their age group. We will not be splitting up the programme geographically, it is great to have all the age groups sharing and interacting together. Pop in regularly to this site to see the updates on this. Also we will begin to profile all our staff on here...

We'll let the footage speak for itself. Below are three examples of using iMovie. A great tool. Simple to use. The bottom footage is of a video some of the 5-7 year old group did. Also, on our "Day 4" tab is another movie a group of the boys made. Enjoy!

Pages on a Mac is the equivalent to Word on Windows. The kids will find that the skills they have already learnt on previous Mac stuff is easily transferred here. Again we will see the "Inspector" and dragging and dropping files is easy as 1-2-3. Oh and I think they're going to love the templates MAC has on offer. Because it's MAC Attack week I used a Pages template to create the poster here on the left. The 5-7 year olds will get to create a poster too as well as their other acitivities. Watch this site for developments with the programme with regard to the 5-7 year olds. We're going to expand it and get more specialised programming for them. Exciting. The photos below were some of the ones we used on our posters. We used a really fun site called Dumpr to add fun effects to our photos then we inserted them into our poster page. This boy added his photo to a rubik cube One girl added a picture of her goldfish to a museum display. She also go...

Keynote has so many great features it really does enable the user to create top class presentations. Today the children will learn about these features and give it a go. I'm not biased toward Mac computers or general PC's but I must say, Keynote sways me in a Mac direction! This quick clip was made with Keynote: THIS WAS AN EXAMPLE CREATED BY ONE OF THE CHILDREN: Decorating our own doorhangers enabled us to have a bit of downtime from computers. Not that anyone really wanted downtime from the computers!!!

Today we worked on the tool.....well we played with the tool "Photobooth". A surprising outcome to the use of this tool was how it quickly broke down the shyness between the newcomers to the holiday programme and knit everyone together! With all it's funny effects everyone ended up in fits of laughter and grabbing each other to show the latest funny pose. As a Co Ordinator of this holiday programme I think Photobooth is going to be a great tool to use consistently to help break the ice. One of the boys made a video with photobooth using the "twin" option, so it looked like him and his clone were making the video. Very clever. We also got used to navigating with the MAC computers by dragging the photos into iPhoto, eiminating any blemishes and fancying up what we wanted. We took one normal shot too on photobooth and uploaded it to a great image editing site called Picturetrail. On Picturetrail we chose the bling option to "bling" up our photo. ...