MacMagic

Whole Earth Review, Summer, 1994 by Digger

HALF THE Kids entering Davidson Middle School in San Rafael, California have trouble finding their way to a period in a simple, declarative English sentence. Yet, plunked in front of a computer with a video camera and a tape recorder, these sixth, seventh, and eighth graders become mavens of multimedia, constructing elaborate stories in pictures and words that truly communicate.

The kids call it MacMagic and it just may be. Students in Davidson's multimedia classroom gather around computers in animated, clamoring groups as if they have a test version of some cool new interactive computer game. Not so. What appears on their screens is the crazy quilt of Manifest Destiny -- the very same lesson that puts other kids into deep-yawning yoga. What makes these kids different? These multimedia history lessons were created for the kids by the kids. The teacher points them in a direction and the students do the rest. Every group is free to shape its own interpretation of the events in the lesson.

Seeing 150 students a day and teachers from all over the world in its summer classes, MacMagic is at the age of five the oldest interactive multimedia teaching program in the country. MacMagic students have been featured on CNN and had their own live satellite link with a school in Washington D.C. They also helped launch a thirty-two page, four-color monthly newspaper called Fast Forward that is by kids and for kids.

What is truly remarkable about the MacMagic story is its setting. Davidson Middle School is one of those public schools that administrators and politicians call "challenged." its utilitarian Gulag-like buildings lie along the border between low-grade warehouses and boxy, hillside apartment complexes. Half of its students are drawn from recent immigrant families who, in spite of the worldwide penetration of American television programs, find themselves lost in a culture that is quite new and mysterious.

Davidson is not the sort of place you would expect to spawn a program like MacMagic; not where a reasonable person would place so much hardware. Yet Davidson was exactly what MacMagic's creators were looking for.

Five years ago a clutch of innovators from Apple Computer's Classrooms of Tomorrow and the George Lucas Educational Foundation set out to show that computers and other digital media could be effective tools for education. They searched the country for a prototypal school and settled on Davidson because of its broad ethnic, social and economic mix and its proximity to the technical forces of Lucas Arts. If multimedia education could work there, it could work anywhere.

Apple donated computers, scanners, printers and software. Lucas Arts supplied the cameras and technical know-how to train teachers on how to get stories out of hardware. Marin Community Foundation funded teacher training.

Genevieve Colteaux, a lifetime classroom teacher who now honchos MacMagic, says that back then she and the other teachers didn't even know how to turn on a computer. The learning curve was steep. In October 1989, just after San Francisco's most recent major shaker, a nervous core of two teachers and two advisors from Lucas Arts launched the program with a lesson for eighth graders on earthquake preparedness.

The school combined language arts, social studies and an elective technology to create a three-period block in which to mix lessons and creative time. Lessons were developed to expose students to the full range of available tools -- incredible tools for a public school, even now. Twenty-eight Macintosh SEs were networked with the scanners, printers, digitizing video cameras, and tape recorders.

The only limitation in the system was the application software MacWrite, MacPaint and HyperCard -- Apple software that is open-ended to encourage the students to develop their problem-solving and critical-thinking skills. Teachers acted as facilitators; students were responsible for their own education.

Like with most innovations, MacMagic's group organization was, in part, expedient. With thirty students in the lab at a time, each of them with different learning speeds, there was only one option -- put the kids in charge. It was a brave move and the results are the real magic of the program.

Small groups of students working and talking together develop an appreciation for each other as learners and as people. When one student stumbles on a problem, another student is there to help. Teachers are not the only source of ideas or answers and the students who need individualized instruction get it -- from other students. Cooperative education. "By the end of the year," Colteaux explains, "every student has had the opportunity to work with every other student in the class."

Projects may take several weeks. Each leads to a multimedia report. As they master real skills in using the hardware, students also develop self-confidence and face-to-face, problem-solving communications tools that are useful in their current technological context.