“Samantha Greene’s parents, there was no getting around it: she had to have an iPod this year. Everybody at school was getting one,” Mark Glassman reports for The New York Times. “At the Brearley School, a private school for girls on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where Samantha is in the eighth grade, the iPod went from a ‘want’ to a ‘must have’ this year when its use was incorporated into foreign-language and classics courses. For about 300 girls in grades 7 through 12, the iPod is now required to do homework and classroom assignments.”
“The 20-gigabyte iPod required by the school sells for $299 at stores but was made available to students for $269 through Brearley with Apple’s education discount. Nonetheless, only 117 students purchased the device through the school, and 95 rented it from the school at a cost of $50 per year. The rest owned them already,” Glassman reports. “While Apple says Brearley’s mandatory-iPod program is the first it has heard of at the secondary-school level, there have been comparable efforts at universities. This fall Duke 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. Last year, Georgia College & State University began lending the devices to students for use in several humanities courses.”
“A panel at the school reviewed several options before deciding on the iPod. ‘We started out looking at the classic language labs,’ said Katherine Hallissy Ayala, the head of the computer education department. ‘They were all kind of expensive and required desktops, and most of them ran on Windows.’ Brearley uses mostly Macs,” Glassman reports.
Full article here.
It’s endemic.
Intelligent First Post.
does anyone learn the old-fashioned way anymore?
Cool. The shape of things to come.
Not bagging the iPod but wouldn’t a PDA be better suited for this kind of thing ? Not so much for the music classes but for the language classes.
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ps does it take others 3 or 4 tries before the security word thing actually works. It’s a pain.
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OK I’ve tried about 9 times already and it keeps sending me back here. Whoever wrote the list of words that are supposed to match the graphics can’t spell for $h1t.
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Back again. Anyone know what exactly means. Are we supposed to the spaces at the fron in as well ?
Finally
those hos are gonna grow up to be.. golddiggers.. wow.. spoiled brats..
“Not bagging the iPod but wouldn’t a PDA be better suited for this kind of thing?”
I believe the idea is to give the students the opportunity to hear the language pronounced properly and repetitively. The iPod interface should be ideal to easily download, get to the part you want to hear, and not be tied to a desk while you are studying.
If I had the iPod when I was in school I wouldn’t be at work telling people over the phone “No habla espa�ol!”
iPods offer the opportunity to reinforce a lecture or proper speaking of a foreign language.
And since a iPod is industry standard device, it’s mandatory that everyone have one.
It feels so… monopolistic, a nice feeling for a change. LOL
Do all the students have to line up to dock their iPods with teacher’s Mac? I wonder how this actually works. Could be a bit of a logistical nightmare.
Which Mac owns the iPod?
John
It is a sign of the times that teachers have to latch on to the latest trend in order to get the attention of their students. A walkman would have done the same job as an iPod, for a lot less $$
mike
those hos are gonna grow up to be.. golddiggers.. wow.. spoiled brats..
Wow, what hostility. Do you feel the same about girls who grow up with cell phones? I didn’t have one when I went through school.
NoM$PlayerforYou!
It feels so… monopolistic, a nice feeling for a change. LOL
Agreed. At least in this case, the monopoly was earned, unlike MS. Plus Apple keeps on making the iPod better and better.
Ben
A walkman would have done the same job as an iPod, for a lot less $$
That is like saying a bicyle does the same as a car for a lot less $$$.
Or maybe a horse and buggy.
If you only consider the price of the device, sure, but there’s a lot more here than just the price of the player, there’s the efficiency with which the program can run when you can just load all the language data onto multiple devices. You don’t have to distribute 30 CDs or tapes for every single class when you present new material. This way a student has immediate access to all their materials, no fumbling through a backpack looking for a certain tape or CD.
Once in place, it’s far more efficent to run with the iPod. I never had a teacher hand out 30 tapes during any of my language classes. There might be a reason why. Maybe because that’s a big pain in the ass for the teacher?
If the MP3’s or AAC’s are posted online (password protected) they can download them to their own Mac or PC before going to school.
They are all blessed with rich parents. Broadband and a home computer would not be a problem. It may even be a boarding school.
Rich upper east side kids getting iPods? Cool! I know what us poor lower east side kids are gettin’ this Christmas! Whoohoo!
“Which Mac owns the iPod?”
No Mac owns an iPod. Any Mac you plug it into recognizes it and you can upload anything you want.