Aiden working with GarageBand to create some music

Immediacy. Responsiveness. Personalisation. These are just some of the qualities you find when you’re using iPhoto software, which comes free with every Apple computer.

The iLife package consists of iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie, iDVD and Garageband.

In my school we work with children with severe learning difficulties and the development of independence is one of our key aims. Programs such as iPhoto allow them to take control of tasks such as downloading photos and creating slideshows to share with the class.

As soon as the digital camera is connected to the computer and turned on the system software realises what has happened and not only starts up iPhoto, but takes you straight to the import option. The pulsing blue button draws your attention and moments later you’re ready to click to watch your freshly imported photos as a full-screen slideshow - with transition effects and music.

Classes around the school have been using this near-instant slideshow facility to get pupils reflecting on lessons during the plenary, and some of the children love pausing the action on a picture featuring themselves. The motivation to communicate with each other and with the adults has to be seen to be believed.

Carefully judged interaction by the adults helps to bring out responses that can clarify each child’s sense of what they have learnt during the session. A day, or a week later, the same photos can be used to reinforce their learning.

When downloaded, the photos sit in the "library", and pupils can create albums of favourite photos, copying and reorganising them as they wish. The program has very simple icon buttons for common tasks such as print, email and edit, along with options to click and set a chosen photo as the desktop image, create a homepage of a set of photos (a feature for .Mac users) and one called Book. This allows the pupils to assemble photos into an attractive album using one of many templates, which can then be ordered online. Now, while most of us would avoid this in the context of working with the class, it’s perfectly possible to print or save the work as a PDF, which can then be used in other contexts, such as on a DVD.

Giving pupils motivating tools to manipulate digital media is a powerful force in developing their self-confidence. The fact that iPhoto now includes substantial editing and adjustment tools means that there’s very little need to venture into Photoshop or other similar programs.

Working together
One of the most significant strengths of iLife is the brilliantly executed integration of each program within it. Slideshows created within iPhoto can be taken straight to iDVD; pictures can be dragged straight from the iPhoto tab in iMovie so that pupils can create films without even having a video camera; tracks created in GarageBand can be exported directly to iTunes, and the music stored in iTunes can be added to iMovie or iDVD projects or to iPhoto slideshows.

iTunes
iTunes is rapidly developing into a tour-de-force within iLife, and it is now capable of not only playing audio files but it can display still photos and videos as well.

Perhaps most important for schools, iTunes has grown into a portal for accessing podcasts (sound files that can be downloaded and stored on iPods), with a dedicated section for education alongside comedy, business and many other categories. If your school is getting into podcasting, as mine is, then you should seriously look into this avenue for sharing your students’ work, as iTunes has such an enormous user base.

The ability to link CD artwork to albums stored in iTunes, has prompted one of our teachers to link pupil’s own photos to their selected tracks within their personal albums, helping the pupils to navigate through the mass of largely text based information.

For some of our pupils, with profound learning difficulties, the built-in visualiser that is part of iTunes can be a powerful attraction that enhances the stimulus of listening to a piece of music, and we have found it very effective for motivating some pupils to maintain a raised head position.

iMovie
The albums created within iTunes can all be accessed in iMovie, and once added to the timeline the track can be trimmed to fit a section of the film. As with importing photos in iPhoto, importing video footage can be achieved remarkably simply. So simply in fact that one of the options iMovie gives you is called "Magic movie". Choosing this option will automatically import your clips from the camcorder, compile them on the timeline, and add pre-selected transitions and music - it will even then export it to DVD.

While most of us may recoil in horror at the thought of this lack of angst, toil and sweat, it does nevertheless offer some of our pupils a real chance to come up with a finished product. And, best of all, the end product can still be edited further by hand if necessary.

Pupils can create a film without any video footage, using still photos, or other images they may have created. These can all be dragged to the timeline in the same way as video clips, and simulated motion (known as the Ken Burns effect) can be applied to pan and zoom on the image creating a sense of movement. Transitions and music can be added just as they can be for standard video footage, and both approaches can be mixed within one film.

Pupils at Frank Wise School have been working with digital video for many years, and we've built up a catalogue of examples of its use across the curriculum. The slow-motion effect can be very effective within PE as a tool for discussion and demonstration; the aged film style was used to great effect in a work on basic concepts of history; subtitles came into their own in a short film working on foreign languages; the clip shelf proved to be a way into pupils’ awareness of other people’s points of view when we made multiple films from one set of clips in PSHE; a series of still images of coins and notes with voiceovers by pupils came together in a film made for numeracy, and of course drama, music and English all generate their fair share of video work.

iDVD
In every case, the involvement of the pupils throughout the making of the film helps to generalise and embed their learning. A simple icon-based button bar allows the creator of a film to select the most suitable output option, ranging from going back to the camcorder tape, through a CD-Rom version, web, email, full-quality DV to store digitally, DVD or even to send it by Bluetooth (a form of wireless communication) to a modern mobile phone!

In the past year, the one or two staff at the school putting video work on to DVD has mushroomed into virtually half of the school having a go, often using a residential or day trip as the stimulus to get started. The feedback from pupils and parents has been superb, and thankfully iMovie makes creating chapter markers a really simple task.

If your project for a DVD needs to be more complex than simply splitting up one long film into sections, then heading straight for iDVD may well be your best option. The program continues the iLife approach of high quality themes and designs, with intuitive buttons and choices. This program comes with a substantial range of professionally-designed themes and all customisable with your own images and video clips. Videos can be added directly within iDVD, as can slideshows of photos.

Perhaps equally important, the originals of the photos can be added so that the person using the DVD can access them as data, and PDFs can also be stored on the disk as data. Apple’s OSX software can create PDFs of anything printable, and this can be a very powerful addition to the DVD.

Adding a slideshow of photos is a simple click of a button, after which you can customise the selection of images, the transitions, the music, and whether or not to offer the user navigation buttons on-screen.

The end product is a DVD disk that can be played on virtually any home player as well as in other computers, making it a superb tool for sharing pupils’ work with home, college, and the local community. Our school made a full feature film of last year’s Christmas production and found the local Odeon cinema more than eager to host our event as they were keen to initiate their brand new digital projection facilities. The pupils, parents, school and others packed the 400-seat venue and experienced the full-scale cinema feast of visuals and audio, all from a DVD disc that had been edited in iMovie and built as a DVD project in iDVD. This is technology that is going places.

GarageBand
The relative newcomer to this integrated package is GarageBand, software for creating music. It has gained enormous respect in its short existence among professional musicians and the education world. Somehow this product embraces the simplicity that allows pupils with severe learning difficulties to dive in and create credible work while also serving the complex demands of music teachers and studio musicians.

The musical strengths of this program are best left to an expert, but its attractions for the pupils I work with are readily summarised. It looks attractive before you even begin, with an interface that is clear without being childish. The quality of the supplied loops is phenomenal, allowing you to get going in seconds without touching anything other than a mouse or touch-screen. The power to edit loops or recordings you make yourself is excellent and relatively intuitive.

You’ll notice that I say "relatively intuitive" here, and there’s a fascinating difference between how readily I felt that I got to know the program compared with some of the pupils I work with. As an adult with certain expectations about the complexity that I’d expect to find to make any sort of reasonable sound with such a program I was somewhat timid as I explored the menus, tools and options.

No such problem for a younger and fresher mind! The tools for recording live music, or using software instruments (again superb quality, based on real samples) are very powerful, and allow pupils to contribute vocal sounds, even if they might find using the loops or playing instruments too much of a challenge.

But music is merely one task this studio environment can perform. We’ve been using it this term to create the soundtracks for our weekly podcasts. Garageband provides a simple visual interface for dropping sound files into and overlaying them to blend together into a single track. The visual nature of the blocks of sound makes it easy for pupils to recognise gaps that need to be closed up or could do with a live vocal recorded in to link them up.

While the programme doesn’t yet show the close integration found in the other elements of the iLife suite, it does already link closely with iTunes, so that a finished piece of work can be exported directly into iTunes and added to playlists or copied to your iPod. Now, we haven’t yet talked about using iPods in the classroom.

Sean O'Sullivan is deputy head of Frank Wise School, Banbury, Oxfordshire