Wednesday, April 28, 2010

iRevolution: iPod Touch in the Classroom

Note the eMacs in the background. Ubiquitous computing in the flesh!

With the hurrah over the iPad, I wandered over to my local Apple Store, which was packed as usual. I ventured tentatively in to the front door and asked the salesperson, "What's the big deal?" All he could discuss were the "apps", which didn't impress me: I just bought myself a birthday iPod Touch and to date have only purchased 1 game that I'm obsessed with and one of my all-time favorite albums. The other apps I've downloaded are all free and about 90% entertainment, 10% productive/informative/educational. I thanked him then walked out.

Then my eye doctor asked me about the iPad: initially I said, "I don't get it," but being in a doctor's office I recanted, "I can see how it would have great use in a hospital, especially with digitizing medical records." He agreed. Then I convinced him not to upgrade to Windows 7, to downgrade to Windows XP...I'm lethal!

Then a friend mentioned getting a Touch to entertain her 1 year old and we researched age appropriate entertainment options: come to find out, there are enough apps for keeping actual kids of all ages occupied, not just kids at heart!

iRevolution (continued): iPad


Yesterday I realized it would be easy to have an iPad connect wirelessly to my projector to enable walking around while demonstrating. The problem is my students are on PCs and Apple and PC are not speaking on speaking terms (Apple is not speaking with a lot of proprietary formats right now). So even though I can foresee a use good enough for me to invest in the iPad (for teaching purposes, of course :), I'll have to take my own advice and wait for the next generation or for Apple to play nice with other formats.