EASTON AREA SCHOOL DISTRICT

School Night at the Apple Store

This week, the Easton Area School District participated in its first School Night at the Lehigh Valley Apple Store. School Night is a worldwide program that  gives teachers and students a community forum to showcase their projects created on a Mac. Every day in our classrooms, throughout all curricular areas, our students are exploring and creating amazing projects with the technology resources in EASD schools.

Tuesday evening, twenty students excitedly presented their podcasts, movies, presentations and writing to a packed house of parents, teachers, administrators, Apple employees, customers, and the EASD Technology Department. The students showed tremendous pride in their work, only shadowed by our pride in them. We’d like to share a little information about each project presented.

Fourth grader, Daniel, from Cheston Elementary school presented his Garage Band podcast. Daniel wrote a commercial to persuade his classmates to buy his Light Up Football. As he explained on Tuesday, students in his class were required to create a persuasive writing that they then recorded to create a live commercial, complete with music and drawings.

The third grade students from Paxinosa demonstrated how to use the program called Comic Life.  Irene from Mrs. Grossbauer's class used Comic Life after she wrote a how-to paragraph and drew her storyboard for How to Make Fudge Brownies.  A'dryanna from Miss. Rodriguez's class used Comic Life to re-tell a story she wrote showing the main points of the story.  Both students enjoyed using Comic Life and even created a comic at the Apple Store teaching Mr. Durie how to use the program.

Billy and Courtney from Tracy Elementary also shared podcasts that they made using Garageband. They demonstrated to the audience how to record voices and then add music. They then played their final projects which consisted of a persuasive podcast Why I think you should let me try to cut you in half by Billy and a how to podcast How to Catch a Leprechaun by Courtney.

Breannah, Jessica and Lauren from F.A.March gave an awesome and informative live presentation on how to create a claymation movie, starting with taking digital photos of their character to building the movement with iMovie. They even added music as a final touch.

During National Poetry month at Forks Elementary, students read selected poetry and recorded their readings using GarageBand. Peter and Jack shared how they then created music to introduce and conclude their piece based on the mode of the poem. All the poems from the class were combined and burned to a CD, which will be a permanent part of the Forks Library.

Each student in Rhiannon and Calvin's third grade class at Palmer made an animated array in Keynote to demonstrate a multiplication fact. Then they used Garageband to choose and add music to their array slides. Rhiannon showed us how all of their slides were put together in a slide show and viewers were challenged to guess the illustrated fact before the multiplication statement appeared.

EAMS students, Leilany and Justin, researched a specific disability using Power Library.  Next, they created Keynote presentations to share the information gathered.  The students enjoyed utilizing various options within the application, such as builds, transitions, images, and sound clips.

Isaias and Savannah from Easton Area Academy presented the fifth and sixth grade students' websites about the planets and the states.  These projects were extremely involved because students needed to conduct research about their topic, create a podcast of pertinent information and create a webpage in iWeb to display their findings.  

Two Shawnee 8th graders made iMovies to share on Apple night.  Matthew made an iMovie about Bebop Jazz musicians as a part of the Shawnee iTeam. His movie featured famous Jazz musicians of the 1940's.  Jomille made an iMovie about how friction is affected by wearing different shoes and clown walking on different surfaces for Mr. Juniper's class.  They both were pretty amazing!

High School Juniors from Mrs. Morgans’ Honors British Literature classes were given the challenge to creatively demonstrate their understanding of William Shakespeare's, Macbeth. Garrison and Andre filmed, edited and presented a brilliant movie trailer based on their interpretation of the play.

We would like to thank the parents for their support in this celebration and the Apple Store for providing this wonderful opportunity.

If you would like to see these projects and MANY more printed and multimedia projects, please join the Technology Department for its first annual Technology Expo. We will be sharing our integration successes at the Palmer Mall, Sunday, May 4 from 10 to 5.