"11 Tools" Post #10

I attended a district session on i-pods conducted an Apple rep. I enjoyed downloading an app for a museum site that offered many printable forms and information about course material. The map and weather apps are also very neat. I typed in our school address and used my fingertips to zoom in and zoom out. For weather, I checked out the current weather in Bordeaux, France and in Panama, Rep. of Panama. I can see students tying in temperature in different cities/countries to their location on earth (latitute and longitude). The i-pod is much smaller than a laptop and fits easily in the student's palm. Fingertip versus keyboard. Mmmmm.

One app I found would serve the students well for vocabulary and spelling, was Hangman. I liked the comments I read on this app.

The email app is a nice feature. I was wowed by the ease of use, zooming in and out on a friend's one. If extensive text is not going to be written, it would definitely be a very good app. I checked out a few comments by users. I found they mostly use i-pods for mail, music, and games. But then, games can have an educational objective tied to them. My son uses his mostly for music and prefers his laptop for other applications. Must be because of the size of the screen.

In the classroom I would include apps in social studies (states and capitals, identifying landforms), math (working with shapes, apps for specific skills like addition, subtraction) and grammar constructs (identifying certain parts of speech, and access/reading of good writing). I can see all kinds of special ed uses, especially with pictures and menu screens.

Possible issues I would have with the use of technology would be the easy way students can cut and copy information (plagiarizing), the ability of the i-pod to only display on the projector movies and slideshows, and the current inability to project the i-pod screen itself to show the navigation process.