I-Pods in the Classroom

In this post I was asked to find some ways that I-Pods can be used in instruction. Here is an article which can be found here, with an educational technology coordinator for the Orange County Department of Education in California, Robert Craven. He gives quite a few examples of how Ipods are being used in the classrooms in his district.

In first grade, students are listening to their reading at their own pace then retelling the story using the voice recorder. Or the same young students do their 60-second timed reading, then the teacher creates a CD record for parents. Also in upper levels, students are using Ipods to interview community members and create oral histories, including images. Others are making PSAs for small-form video delivery. Students are also beginning to produce weekly podcast reviews of the content they studied during the week, which are then being used for review throughout the year.

Duke University started a project of using Ipods in their classrooms back in 2005 and has increased their usage more and more as the years have passed. The were originally just used by students mainly to record lectures and to records musical performance. They started out giving them out to select faculty and very specifically picked students. By Fall 2008, they were being used in over 100 courses with at least 139 instructors and over 600 students. Students used the video option:

to create videos for final course projects,
to capture video of themselves speaking for a language course,
to record in‐class theater and musical performances,
to record interviews, and
to support documentary film projects.

You can find information on Duke's Digital Initiative by clicking here.