A Trip to the Apple Store
by Christopher Rybicki 2016
That's something I never would have expected in high school - going all the way to the Apple Store as part of a school field trip! And though we use quite a lot of Apple products at school as part of our 21st century learning movement, I've never actually been to their flagship store. It turns out it lived up to most of my expectations!
First and foremost, the Apple store is very stylized. They choose to have a very clean, white, modern look that complements most of its products. There were three floors, all organized by the product lines - the first floor had their newest addition, the Apple Watch, along with iPhones. The second floor had MacBooks and iPads, and the third floor had the Genius bar (for customer service) as well as desktops. The third floor is also where we had our workshop.
Here we had a great time learning about some advanced techniques and shortcuts for using Macs. Admittedly, I already knew some of the shortcuts, like Cmd+Q to quit a window or Shift + minimize to show longer animations. But there were a lot of tips I didn't know. Like if you are making a screencast and want to zoom in to parts of your screen, you can use Ctrl+scroll to zoom in and out, once you enable it in accessibility. There were too many to list them all, but it was certainly a lot of information.
From there, we split into groups and created training videos together. At the individual Mac desktops, we were able to try some of the things we learned and make screencasts in specific using the QuickTime player on the Mac. It was especially convenient since we all got Apple EarPods! After thinking of some ideas, Sarah and I decided to make a screencast on Pixelmator. This is an app which I don't have, but I recognized many of the features from other graphic editors of its type. The audio did not work properly when we saved the video, but we were still able to show off a lot of features for drawing and editing photos. Based on our experience, we are going to be trying out the trial for Pixelmator in our help desk class.
It was a long trip to and from the Apple Store, but I certainly enjoyed our time there. As we left, we were finally able to save our videos on special USB bracelets that we received and put our own names on. Though the time felt short, I think it was a pleasant experience and showed insight into the experience of working with tech support in the real world, as there is always a need to learn new skills and techniques. Hopefully my other classmates can agree that we all had a pleasant time visiting the Apple Store and were glad to spend the time on the field trip.
First and foremost, the Apple store is very stylized. They choose to have a very clean, white, modern look that complements most of its products. There were three floors, all organized by the product lines - the first floor had their newest addition, the Apple Watch, along with iPhones. The second floor had MacBooks and iPads, and the third floor had the Genius bar (for customer service) as well as desktops. The third floor is also where we had our workshop.
Here we had a great time learning about some advanced techniques and shortcuts for using Macs. Admittedly, I already knew some of the shortcuts, like Cmd+Q to quit a window or Shift + minimize to show longer animations. But there were a lot of tips I didn't know. Like if you are making a screencast and want to zoom in to parts of your screen, you can use Ctrl+scroll to zoom in and out, once you enable it in accessibility. There were too many to list them all, but it was certainly a lot of information.
From there, we split into groups and created training videos together. At the individual Mac desktops, we were able to try some of the things we learned and make screencasts in specific using the QuickTime player on the Mac. It was especially convenient since we all got Apple EarPods! After thinking of some ideas, Sarah and I decided to make a screencast on Pixelmator. This is an app which I don't have, but I recognized many of the features from other graphic editors of its type. The audio did not work properly when we saved the video, but we were still able to show off a lot of features for drawing and editing photos. Based on our experience, we are going to be trying out the trial for Pixelmator in our help desk class.
It was a long trip to and from the Apple Store, but I certainly enjoyed our time there. As we left, we were finally able to save our videos on special USB bracelets that we received and put our own names on. Though the time felt short, I think it was a pleasant experience and showed insight into the experience of working with tech support in the real world, as there is always a need to learn new skills and techniques. Hopefully my other classmates can agree that we all had a pleasant time visiting the Apple Store and were glad to spend the time on the field trip.
