March 2006 — Features
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In iPod We Trust
Beloved by students worldwide, the ubiquitous little MP3 player is becoming a presence in the classroom as teachers discover its many educational uses.
A SECOND-GRADER at Willowdale Elementary School in Omaha, NE, is the speaker in a podcast titled Respect Rocks!. His segment of Radio WillowWeb is freely available worldwide through Apple’s iTunes (www.apple.com). Respect is one of the Six Pillars of Character that the young student and his fellow schoolmates are studying, and they are sharing what they have learned about it.
In
Orange County, CA, a Latino student sits with his grandparents and asks them
for stories of Guatemala, and what it was like for them to emigrate to a very
different country. While his relatives shyly decline to be videotaped, they
are comfortable talking in the presence of the iPod and its recording accessory.
Later, the student will take the audio recording and combine it with a slide
show of old family photos to produce a DVD that he’ll share with his classmates
and his entire family.
A teenager in Scotland downloads a French assignment and listens to it on the way home from school. She knows that shortly a text message will appear on her mobile phone that will test her knowledge. Her text reply will be automatically posted to a Web site, where she’ll later take an online exam to measure her progress.
First it was an innovation. Then it escalated to a movement. Now the iPod has sprung a genuine reformation, coming to a global or four-walled classroom near you, no matter where in the world you are. From kindergarten to college, in applications of all kinds, what was originally designed as a mere portable music player is on its way to becoming an essential educational tool. On its way? Ready or not, it’s already here.
‘The Gold Medal of Stuff’
At heart, the iPod’s appeal is about its easily accessible audio and visual content in an attractive and conveniently sized package. Mechanically, the product is mostly a hard disk drive (although some models use only flash memory) with a small display screen. While the display capabilities of the new video iPod don’t really compare with the living-room TV set, especially in a time of oversized plasma screens, that TV set can’t travel in your pocket wherever you go, carrying all of your music, audio books, and favorite video pieces along with it.
In creating the initial product, Apple was targeting a market for portable music that had existed in one form or another since the invention of the transistor radio in the 1950s. But the success of the iPod is due to more than just its ability to access a wide variety of audio—and now video—content on the go. Its versatility is popular with users as well. The addition of a simple accessory turns the iPod into a recorder, allowing the user to capture audio content that can be quickly uploaded and distributed anywhere in the world via the Internet. And several related software technologies that link with the iPod enable people with little training to do things like organizing, editing, and publishing photos, music, and video that once were the sole province of dedicated hobbyists or professional artists.
