Assignment+5

//**Assignment 5 iTunesU**//

Upon exploring the iTunesU Application on my iPad, I discovered the inspiring Florida Digital Educators' “Publishing a Magazine”to be the most applicable Vidcast to integrate into my Language Arts students’ fourth quarter DEADLINE magazine project. For this reason, I plan to show this video to students tomorrow as an inspirational digital kickoff to the project. This short educational video depicts a sixth grade Language Arts classroom in action as they use iPages and laptops to create a collaborative class magazine. The teacher and various students explain their assigned roles within their two-week magazine project. Immediately apparent to viewers is the class’s combined sense of excitement to use digital tools and technology to research and write articles, create advertisements, and design the magazine’s overall layout. The enthusiasm of student editors and photographers involved is also evident through their personal narrative descriptions. The teacher continues to explain how she and students are using iPages to design their class magazine and the Internet to search for companies to advertise within their digital magazine. I hope that witnessing fellow middle school students enjoying utilizing digital tools to publish literature firsthand will encourage my own students to take a risk and innovate their own magazine publishing this year.

My goal is to utilize this particular iTunesU video resource not only to enhance our ongoing lesson to students modeling ways to modernize our traditionally paper, pencil, and computer based project but also to encourage, motivate, and challenge them to use iPages, iPads and laptops to create digital magazines as well. As editors-in-chief of their own paper fictional magazines, students in past years have used Microsoft Word to write column articles, create advertisements, and design other miscellaneous items to sell to eighth grade peers. Ultimately, students have published excellent paper magazines and eagerly shared them with friends and family. However, in order to encourage students to design digital magazines as well, students have spent a week in class and an additional week over spring break reading both paper and digital magazines. After completing a magazine survey on our classroom Web site that guides students to compare their experiences reading paper and digital magazines, students will then choose which type, paper or digital, that they would like to publish this year. It is my hope that many students will choose to use the iPad to create a digital magazine in iBooks or other apps and digitize the publishing of their magazines to match their personal preferences for using digital tools like iPads on a daily basis. Because iTunesU offers easy access to integrate such engaging digital audio, video, and book content into my classroom instruction, I view its benefits as invaluable to integrate student learning with teaching twenty-first century technology skills.