This is a post I wrote as Durham Academy Middle School started to use the iPod Touch Bretford Cart with Mrs. Hall’s 5th Grade History Course. We have 28 16 GB iPod Touchs in the cart and 2 for teachers to use to investigate the apps and how to use it with their classes. All are configured to connect to the wireless with the same restrictions as other tools.
I share it here as I am intrigued to find out how schools can further harness the “tools” our students bring to school with them, but hide or do not use during the day. To continue to ban these devices seems so out of date. Harness not Hinder would make sense to me.
Questions to Ponder:
- What changes when everyone in class has a connected tool so information access is literally a “touch” away?
- How must teachers adapt their curriculum to be ready? (This may be less of an issue for schools that have had a 1 to 1 program).
- What infrastructure needs to be in place?
- What happens when or if Apple releases the Macblet, iPod Tablet, or whatever you want to call it? Will it look like this from Sports Illustrated?
- How out of date will classrooms and textbooks look then to our students?
We were finally able to use the iPod Touch Cart today with Mrs. Hall’s 5th grade History class. It took some learning on my part to make sure the settings were correct to insure the students would be able to use them on our wireless network in a safe manner. Mrs. Hall had a great lesson designed that used Moodle, Dictionary, All Countries, Today in History, and Google Earth. Students found their pen pal school in Shipley UK.
This is a picture the student took of Shipley using Google Earth on the iTouch.
From Google Earth on an iPod Touch
To date we purchased the following apps: (When possible I purchased multiple copies of the application since we have 30 iPods although there is no easy way to do this from within the iTunes Store)
SAT Princeton Review $4.99, AlgebraPrep Equations $2.99, AlgebraPrep Factoring $2.99, AlgebraPrep Graphing $2.99, AlgebraPrep Real Numbers $2.99, Lemonade Stand .99 cents, Word Warp .99 cents, JV idioms .99 cents, More Blanks $1.99, Units – Converter .99 cents, Chemical Touch .99 cents, USA Factbook and Quiz .99 cents, Today in History .99 cents, Art .99 cents, ABC Cursive Writing .99 cents, Darkness .99 cents, Strip Designer $2.99, Comic Touch $2.99, World Wiki + Factbook .99 cents, Geomaster $1.99
We use the following free apps:
English
Vocab Wiz, Stanza, Shakespeare, Dictionary and Thesaurus, VocabDaily – Word of the Day, GrammarUp
Math
Math Drills Lite, Math Tricks Lite, Elementary Math Lite, HiCalc Lite
Science
iSeismometer, EpiCentral, Distant Suns Lite
History
Constitution, Declaration of Independence, All The Countries, Maps of the World, USA Presidents
Languages
Spanish Tutor
Other:
FirstClass, Durham Academy Mobile (Moodle), iHandy Level, GoodGuide, and Google Earth
Podcasts and iTunesU Movies
Speaking of History, Grammar Girl, WGBH Earth and Space, WGBH Physical Science, Lit2Go
Resources I used to learn more about iPod Touches in Education:
Classroom 2.0 Grey Culbreth’s Schoolwide Implementation
Grey Culbreth’s YouTube Channel
New: iPod Touch in Education from the K12 Online Conference by Kern Kelley
