It is about 3:20 p.m. on the sixth Thursday of Term 2. Fourteen kids, each with a laptop, are in the school library. Most are sitting at a cluster of tables in one corner of the room. They are watching a teacher demonstrate how to burn a CD. After the demonstration, the kids begin working on their media production projects. For the last six weeks they have been using GarageBand to compose a song that will be burned to a group CD at the end of term.
Meanwhile, 12-year-old Dana is sitting on the other side of the library. She does not seem to have been participating in the demonstration; indeed, she has been typing on her laptop. Instead, she is copying handwritten words from a notebook onto a PowerPoint slide.
I ask several questions of Dana: What are the words? Where did the idea come from? When do you work on these slides? Do you have any other slides like these? Dana says that the ‘words are [my] own’. She shows me a slide with a list of bands. She says that the presentation is self-initiated; it is ‘my own idea’. She says ‘[I] only do it at MediaClub’, but then adds that she has also been using the library computers to work on it at lunch time. Further, this is not her only slideshow; she ‘has another one started’.
Dana then goes back to her typing. When she has finished copying from her notebook, she experiments with layout and fonts. Then she adds a title slide, typing ‘By Dana’. After that, she inserts images of hearts, girls and flowers. She puts her headphones on and sings quietly while looking at her slides. I ask Dana whether she will present the slideshow to anyone. She says she will put it on a USB and show her family. When I mention Dana’s self-initiated PowerPoint project to the media teacher, she says that Dana tried to do something similar during last year’s GarageBand module.