Educational Use of an Ipod

The next time you see a kid with an Ipod, they may just be studying. My son has to memorize a dialogue for his Spanish class, so we learned how to record voices with garage band, which is basically just making your own podcast. I haven't used Garage Band before, but it was similar to Imovie, so with some fiddling around, we did manage to record the dialogue. Even though I took 5 years of Spanish between high school and college twenty years ago, I did manage to read most of the dialogue correctly. After it was recorded, we had some fun with it and added the helium effect. The dialogue was exported to Itune and then we downloaded to his ipod.

So now that I have put into use what I learned at a Special Education Assistive Technology workshop, I can see how useful an Ipod can be in the class. I wonder how many regular education teachers out there can figure out how easy it is for kids to record their notes? Just think how easy it would be to have your notes on the ipod to study for a test, which then leads into restricting ipods during tests. There's only one student in our program who has used this feature with their Ipod, but I don't see him as a cheater, however, there are others out there who already plagiarize papers off the net and may figure this out.

Now what we need to do, is to get more of our slower readers out there with downloaded books to be able to read in class assigned books. Okay, so I am dreaming. But in my perfect world, I would love to see kids take on more initiative for their own learning. "Hey, Mrs. B, look at this cool book I found on Itunes last night...."

It's going to be interesting to observe the decreased communication skills of this generation as they walk around with headphones on. Besides the lack of opportunity to communicate with each other verbally, they are all going to experience deafness as they get older.

So how did I get from praising the Ipod to writing about the negative aspects of it? It would have to be from the realization that teenagers are still just teenagers and even though others see educational value in the Ipod, they are going to be thinking about the music. Maybe Apple could be using the advertising strategy of the educational value of an Ipod.
"Mom, Dad, I really need to have an Ipod for school"