iPods - mobile learning

This morning's article said that 16% of iPod owner plan to buy an iPad. There are 75 million iPod owners meaning that there are potentially some 12 million buyers of this new technology and that doesn't count any of the 200 million who don't own iPods. In marketing, I would think that Apple is smiling. In education, we need to get out of the starting blocks.

We may not be the next developers of Apps for the iPod or iPad, but if it's as easy as we experienced this week, to develop Apps, there will be many more that 4400 in a very short time. The other striking statistic is that of those young people thinking about buying a handheld device in the next 6 months, 100%, yes, 100% plan to buy an iPod. With the introduction of the iPad that may change.

Whether get an opportunity to design a lesson around an iPod in the next couple weeks, lessons around iPods are in the future and we need to be there also. It's not if this technology will effect education and its delivery, but when and how. How do we integrate the attitudes of young people, the fads of the time, the motivators of society into better pedagogy?

Pod Casting

I don't think there's any relationship between pod casting and fly casting, but maybe it's the balance between the two that keeps us sane.

Designing a podcast using GarageBand is so straight forward. There's a line for images, a line for jingles, a line for voice and more lines for more music. Write a monologue and record it into the voice line. Find images and add them in the top line as they match the speaking, with just a click and drag from a computer folder. Find a jingle or music for appropriate background. Save it or publish it in iTunes and the lesson is ready.

And it is so useful, and it's straight forward enough for students to develop their own podcasts.

Wow.

Time to Remember

...not "the time in September." But...

The reason(s) we doing this blogging.

It's a gradual process to a huge project at the end of the term: designing a lesson outline using as least five of the technologies we exploring in class. As described on the Internet at http://www.wou.edu/~saxowsd/tech2/ed421/final.php

Another Document Format

Images are as common place and second nature on the Internet as text.  Highlight, copy, paste to retrieve text from the Internet.  Right click and Save Image As to download an image.  Creating text and images on the Internet typically generating the same format as one downloads: typically .doc or .jpg.

With movies in iMovie, the camcorder was uploaded in some unknown format and manipulated and saved through some complex unknown process.  At the end of the editing the movie was Shared, in our case, for Quicktime.  It could be viewed on the Internet as a .mov.

Now the process in GoogleEarth is becoming less clear, but still fun.  The process in GoogleEarth of finding sites is, well, easy.  Adding an image is a bit more complex because the image has to be on the Internet, not just on the computer or in Photoshop.  But it's the saving and retrieving that remains a mystery.  First we click on video to make a tour; then on the record button; and then on the disk icon to save it which needs to be in the folder with the sites.  Then we need to select the folder and Save As which is saved with the extension .kmz.  But if we save it on the Internet to share with other, we can't just click on the icon and watch it, and we can't right click on the icon and download the document (.kmz) and then view it in GoogleEarth.  Hence, a mystery to be lived and not necessarily one to be understood.

But it's a marvelous tool for geography and just about any other subject.