Personalising Learning with the iPod Touch

I came upon this recently posted article on IEAR tonight about syncing iPods.

This unit, which will sync 20 iPods at a time to one iTunes library is made by PARAT solutions. And yes, they are available in Australia.

I would certainly be interested in something like this, as syncing on my Lenovo Thinkpad R60 can be a chore. Although, as the photo below shows, I have employed ’secret weapons’ Josh and Michael, who give up their Wednesdays to ease the burden. Josh is shown here, with iPods collected on Wednesday mornings. He has a list of the playlists that need to be constructed and dropped on the iPods and the Apps are ready to updated based on choices made by teachers throughout the week.

My MacBook pro is certainly much faster at backing up iPods before they are synced. We have 8 new Gen 2 iPod touches this week for our PL staff which I synced one at a time last night.

At least the teachers have all gone home this weekend with a big smile on their faces! Just imagine the time saved with this unit. I have also investigated the ipod cart, used by Culbreth Middle School NC, but these only seem to be available in the United States.

I also use playlists in iTunes to manually drag and drop selections of audio and video resources onto students’ iPods, without any syncing at all. This lends itself well to the personalised approach to learning when each student in my class is working on a different project.

Here is another syncing story and discussion… “The iPod octopus”

I am sure that in the future that Apple will look to supporting an educational model for syncing the iPod touch for groups of students, rather than for the individual, where it all began.