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Tuesday, October 31, 2006

 

An iPod Serves Educational Purposes?

The Brearly school district requires students in grades 7 through 12 to have an iPod in order to complete their homework and classroom assignments. It is an expensive hand held device that most people use to listen to music. This school district will sell iPod's to students for $269 or allow them to rent it from the school for $50 per year or simply use the ones that they already own.

Many foreign language teachers find this device to be extremely helpful. The iPod enables students to download audio files of the chapters in their textbooks from the school's academic server. Teachers also enable their students to use this device to “upload songs and audio books in foreign languages to supplement the audio materials that come with their textbooks.”

A student named Samantha Green agrees “that the iPod has helped her foreign-language skills” because she gets a better sense of how the language is spoken when listening to it on her iPod. This reveals that iPods help keep students engaged in the lessons and help them understand the languages better.

Teachers decided to implement iPods as a part of classroom instruction because students would be able to listen to “real-world content [which] could encourage students to use their iPods more often. The hope is that if students are interested in this, they'll download and explore on their own without being told to."

It seems that iPods are the new instructional tool of the future because universities are also catching onto this trend. For example, Duke University “issued an iPod to each of its 1,650 incoming freshmen and has tried to incorporate the device into several courses, including music, language and engineering.” It is also known that “Georgia College & State University began lending the devices to students for use in several humanities courses.”

This proves that iPods are a helpful instructional tool that many teachers are using in their lessons.


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