May 2008 — Features
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Fill 'Er Up
Sold by Durham, NC-based Modality, Raybook's programs originated in brain-mapping software that company founder Mark Williams, a neuroscientist at Duke University, had created for computers and modified for iPod use. According to Robert Pleasants, the company's director of education, Williams' "A-ha!" moment came when a student told him she had learned five new brain terms while waiting in line for a latte. From then on, it was just a matter of deciding "what other applications made sense for these devices," says Pleasants. "They have market share and cachet. They are used as music devices, and not everyone has tapped into their educational power. A lot of schools buy iPods, but haven't figured out how to use them yet."
By taking advantage of the device's inherent simplicity, Raybook is making a bid to corner the handheld market. "There's more learning capacity with the iPhone, but we want to stay with iPod content rather than make it web-based," says Pleasants. "You can download it and then it's always available. At this point in technology, it's more valuable to have the content always at your fingertips. The pedagogic value can get lost in the shadow of what's cool or neat."
With that in mind, Raybook keeps the content similar to what's found on flash cards, while using the technology to get students' attention-or "leveraging the cool factor of the iPod," as Pleasants puts it. "We're taking the learning content they need and putting it on a device they love."
That equation adds up for students at North Carolina's Durham Academy, a private K-12 institution of 1,134 students. Karl Schaefer, chair of the middle school computer department and digital learning coordinator, champions the use of both iPods and Raybook's Math Facts software. The school has purchased site licenses for the third and fourth grades. At $6 per student, the cost of licensing is high, but bound to drop, says Schaefer. And he's a true believer in the benefits: "Just a month into this project, I'm convinced that this is the way to go, especially for the lower and middle schools. I look at the technology that kids bring to school and try to harness that. You can either ban iPods or fill them with content. We're not a laptop school, so converged devices are critical to us. What do they have in their bookbags that we're not letting them use?"
According to Schaefer, Durham Academy teachers have observed that students who use iPods for instruction perform better on quizzes. Students also make resourceful use of the devices, he says. "One eighth-grade student memorized the Declaration of Independence by recording it on [Apple's] GarageBand at home, sending it to iTunes, then sending it to her iPod. I thought that was phenomenal."
So phenomenal, in fact, that Schaefer plans to buy a learning lab with 20 iPods in 2009, at a cost of $13,000. "The reason I wanted to invest is that I wanted to research the idea thoroughly," he says. "Many publishers don't understand how to repackage their content. This is so new that for many schools it's going to be cost-prohibitive unless they have a formalized program."
