My New Favorite Software

My favorite software this week has to be Apple’s Keynote which has been upgraded in iWork ’08 to be a powerful multimedia creation tool. A current project I started on with students since I returned from the NCETC conference is to create book talk podcasts using Keynote instead of Garageband to start the process. We have been having issues with using Garageband ’08 with our networked home directories that students here all use. While we have taken steps to fix that (Portable Home Directories) using Keynote to create slides and then recording the script students wrote makes a fast and wonderful enhanced podcast.

We will send them to Garageband when done recording the podcast to tweak it with additional soundtracks or other elements as well as to apply some ID3 tags so they show up with the correct information. This allows students to illustrate their podcasts with titles and images.

I showed this to Kate Birgel an 8th grade Language Arts teacher who went to work right away creating a Keynote on the book: Of Mice and Men which she will add to her DAILE Moodle course as a resource for students.

I have only begun to design ways to use Keynote to enhance teacher Moodle courses and create content with students. Thanks to Durham Academy for sending me to NCETC and for Neil and Matt for showing me the Send to command.

Technorati Tags: ,

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *