iPod nation

Last week’s lecture we began talking about podcasts and the usefulness for not only this class but as future educator. My article for this week comes from the campus of Georgia College and State University. This rural university has adapted many new ways that the students can stay on top and engaged with everyday school activities using iPod technology.  
Some of the ideas they have tried over the school year are as follows: iDreamers, this is a team of students who are constantly inventing new ways to use ipod technology. Recently they have found a way to use ipods as video yearbooks and pamphlets advertising for the school. History professor Deborah Vess asks students to download 39 films to their video-capable iPods so she doesn’t have to spend class time screening the movies. Psychology professor Noland White has found a new-age answer to office hours: a podcast of the week’s most asked questions. Hank Edmondson, a government professor known around campus as “The Podfather,” was among the first to use iPods to supplement his course lectures. Edmondson now makes lectures, language study programs, indigenous music and thumbnail art sketches available for download to the iPods of students in a three-week study-abroad program he leads. He used this technology overseas during trips to many of Madrid museums. He would prerecord whatever information he uses during that time. Now the students had more individual time to walk around and enjoy the sites while listening to the lecture over headphones.
There are some skeptics to this technology, many of them with this same idea of students not actively engaging with the material. “Learning is through interaction, discussion, critical questioning and challenging of assumptions,” said Donna Qualters, director of the Center for Effective Teaching at Northeastern University in Boston. Many teacher feel that if we cut out face to face interaction and group discussion students are missing out on a great deal of valuable learning.
In the college level I think this technology is absolutely useful, already students don’t get the required one on one time so the shift is not that great. In high school I agree with the arguments from the opposing side.  Students at this level should be focusing more on group interaction and the importance of critical thinking. However new ideas are always forming and I feel this technology will benefit all levels of education some day.