The new iLife arrived and my children (age 12 & 9) and I tested it out. We created a family website. Using garage band I had them each make a podcast, really a message to Grandma. In iPhoto they created a photocast, this caused some heated debate about what to include, one wants grandma to see the entire collection of 1579 photos the other wants just shots of herself. We compromised on just last months photos. We then tackled iWeb to put it together. We created an “about us” page, a photo page, and a blog page that included the podcast. We worked just with the templates, dragged and dropped things into place and replaced the place holding text. We did not try to alter the templates though later experiments showed this is possible. Finally we password protected it and sent it to my .MAC account. It worked. The whole affair took two hours, would be less except for sibling squabbles.
I have not kept the site up tough because I’d like to correct their spelling and add better captions to the photos – Grandma will have to wait another week or two.

I was also interested in seeing if I could post this to another site. So I saved it to a folder as iWeb suggests and followed the directions and was able to upload it to my host space, temporarily my homepage was replaced by my family site. This took a bit to have it view properly, I needed to rename a page or two but it was possible.

There is a lot of potential for a true multimedia experience, so many ways to express yourself, photos, audio, video, the written word. I have been thinking of the possibilities – scanning in a students artwork and having the student use a podcast to describe their inspiration. A class can comment on current events using the blog. A high school student can create an online portfolio that can be viewed by potential colleges. From a Universal Design perspective this can help a teacher/student interact with content from a number of perspectives. Really we are just limited by our imaginations.