November 11, 2007

Suggested Uses of Church iMac Lab

I am excited that we have a brand new iMac lab deployed and in the rotation for Sunday School for our church (Raytown Christian Church). I'm interested in hearing from folks with software suggestions and how they are using classroom computers at church.

For those those of you unfamiliar with the Workshop Rotation Model in Sunday School, the classes work on the same bible story for a whole unit and rotate around to different rooms-- one week a class may be in the story telling room where someone might dress up as Noah and tell the story, one week in the kitchen where they may make arks out of graham crackers, one week in the craft room where they make cutout animals, etc. We also have a media room where they can make/watch videos about the story and put together skits. And now newest into our rotation is the computer lab, where they can use drawing programs for any story but also several bible stories have programs written for them. We just finished using a Jonah program from sundaysoftware.com. After some work, the program ran great and the kids were enthralled.

I don't know of anyone else who has a Mac lab at their church... anyone out there? If there are three of us, I'd like some networking to happen regarding software that has worked and not. We have new Intel iMacs so have to be wary of software being sold as Mac compatible when what it means is that it runs in Classic, or only functionally on PPC.

Ideas we're exploring include:
1. The kids can do testmonials or story-telling into iMovie that we can use in worship presentation on the big screen.
2. We're thinking of have a segment where the older kids can use iWeb and put together little web pages that will be available in a special section of our church web site and the kids can update it at the end of each unit with pictures (some that they draw) and text that explains what they've learned in that unit. They can then show it to their parents and friends from home via the web.

We're also going to be finding other uses for the iMac lab at church. One is, we're going to have "How to email your grandchildren" classes. We already support another ESL class, but we're going to look into a community literacy class.

I'd be happy to hear suggestions/brainstorms of other uses in kids' Sunday school and otherwise.

1 comment:

Nick said...

Looks beautiful.