The process of checking out of the hotel and getting the car loaded caused us to miss our first session this morning. Homer and I had been getting several requests for information about podcasts, so we decided to attend a session about iPods.
First, I’ve got mixed feelings about podcasts. I think they have the potential for being abused, just like the horrible misuses of PowerPoint when everyone was jumping on that bandwagon. I think there are some great things that one can do with a podcast in a classroom, but you really need to know what you’re doing, and have a purpose for doing it. Otherwise, you come off as some bozo rambling into a microphone.
That being said, said, the session "I Didn’t Know You Could Do That with an iPod!" by Tony Vincent looked interesting for the very fact that it wasn’t about podcasting. The activities were interesting – converting PowerPoint slides into JPGS and viewing them in the photo viewer, creating quizzes, putting vocabulary words into the Contacts function were just a few of the activities.
While these activities were interesting, they all struck me as work-arounds. I wouldn’t go out and buy a classroom set of iPods to do the activities listed. There are other devices (hand-helds, etc) that accomplish these tasks much more efficiently, and probably cheaper. However, if you happen to have a few iPods around, these are just a few more ways you can use them.
[tags]NECC, NECC2007, iPod, Tony Vincent[/tags]