iMovie for Kids
Nat Torkington
Mar. 07, 2004 01:18 PM
Permalink
I'm in New Zealand for three months, and working from the local high school's IT office. Over the last two weeks or so, I've seen Vern ("The IT Guy") work late nights and weekends to put together nearly seventy clamshell iBooks running OS 9. I couldn't understand why on earth he'd work that hard for a lousy teacher's salary.
This morning a teacher poked his head around the door. Geoff was a very happy man. Beaming, you might say. "Where's Vern?" Out, checking machines for someone. "I wanted to say `thanks' for the iBooks. It's unbelievable!"
Unbelievable? They're years out of date, running a geriatric operating system, and surely as slow as a wet week. Unbelievable?
"The kids are loving them! I've got `lower band' kids, and nobody's told them they can't do this. There are no words--everyone's told them they can't spell, so words are no good. But this is pictures, and they're making movies as good as anyone's. It's amazing for them!"
Now I understand why Vern worked those weekends and late nights. He's not installing laptops for demanding and ungrateful surly employees of a large faceless company to prepare Powerpoint slides on. He's opening doors for kids that everyone else has given up on. That's a pretty good reason to work extra hours, I think.
--Nat
Nat Torkington
is conference planner for the Open Source Convention, OSCON Europe, and other O'Reilly conferences. He was project manager for Perl 6, is on the board of The Perl Foundation, and is a frequent speaker on open source topics. He cowrote the bestselling Perl Cookbook.
Comment on this weblog
You must be logged in to the O'Reilly Network to post a comment.
Return to weblogs.oreilly.com.
Weblog authors are solely responsible for the content
and accuracy of their weblogs, including opinions they
express, and O'Reilly Media, Inc., disclaims any and
all liabililty for that content, its accuracy, and
opinions it may contain.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons License.
|
