Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

Open culture, has just published 10 unexpected uses for an iPod (some of which are perhaps not that unexpected, such as learning a foreign language), but there are some interesting ones in the list, including calculating the right tip in a restaurant, and the most recent controversy in schools - cheating in exams. In the latter case it does not seem that bizarre at all that some institutions provide iPods to help students learn, while others ban them to prevent cheating.

So here’s my 10 very obvious ways to use iPods in education:

1. get your students to use it as a digital recorder to record the reminiscences of an older person about a period before they were born;
2. record your own podcasts for your students to download and use for revision purposes, or if they missed your class due to illness;
3. create custom multiple choice quizzes (use iquizmaker for this) as a revision aid for your students and share them with other teachers (you need iquiz from the iTunes store to run these);
4. get your students to create multiple choice quizzes for younger students to use on specific topics;
5. save up for a TuneStudio (released this summer by Belkin) for your music room, and get the kids mixing and recording music directly to their iPods;
6. listen to the many educational podcasts available for your own professional development, perhaps in the car on your way to and from school. (Buy a cheap iPod to cassette tape to play them on the in-car cassette player you never use anymore.);
7. get your class podcasting, and their parents subscribing to their feed -encourage them to listen to these on their way to work as well, and then discuss them with their children when they get home;
8. download videos from TeacherTube and convert them to the appropriate format for use on a video iPod;
9. get the new ViewSonic PJ258D with a video iPod dock and show those videos directly from your iPod (probably not, there are cheaper ways of doing this, and it’s not going to look that good anyway);
10. realise that these nine things are not that difficult to do, nor in fact any different from what could have been done twenty years ago with a school cassette recorder or video camera. What makes the difference today is the method of distribution making these ideas much easier to accomplish and share.

Oh and finally, for the Design Technologists out there - build an iPod dock out of Lego!

Image credit: Javier Sánchez

Blogged with Flock