The Mac at Forty!

If you are as seasoned as I am, you were using the Mac from its very beginning. Or maybe you adopted this classroom magic some years later.  

Images from some early Macintosh in the classroom days.

• Starting with 5 or 6 Macs in a book room, journalism students pumped out a graphically designed school newspaper.  They personalized each machine naming it to indicate what section of the paper their “personalized assistant” supported. The program grew into a school wide TV station with a video bulletin run by students.
• Students participated in Visionary Stampede, a multiple county student run initiative with 10 schools in the Bay Area collectively making a CD-Rom magazine using Apple Media tool (1995).
• A Federal Education Grant, Virtual High School came our way. Our students took classes from teachers across the country using an early online platform and we reciprocated  by producing our own unique and engaging online electives for students across the nation. (1997)
• On our Nature Bridge outdoor trips from California to Washington State we carted our iBooks to Olympic Park. Students created lessons and taught science to students in the lab back home, quite a challenge over sketchy Internet connections!
• We did a multimedia history project for our city, published on CD-Rom
• With our video enabled Macs, we participated in C-Span’s Campaing Cam (now renamed Student Cam) and had our prize winning videos played nationally on C-Span.
• We expanded and grew new electives at our school - digital photography, video production, web design. communications, multimedia production - all supported by a Mac lab (and we ran our own server!)
• And we always sent a group of teachers, every year, to MacWorld in San Francisco to learn about the innovations ahead.

Macintosh - you rock! #Mac40