iPods: Not Just for Music Anymore
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Apple’s iPod has been on the market for five years. In that time Apple has sold about 70 million of the music players. They’re not just for tuning out the rest of the world, however. As with many Apple products, the iPod is making its mark in the classroom.
Perhaps the best-known example of the iPod being welcomed into the classroom is Duke University. In 2004, the college gave iPods to its entire freshman class “as part of a university initiative to encourage creative uses of technology in education and campus life,” according to the university’s web site. There are numerous stories on the site showing how clever instructors have managed to use the iPod as a valuable teaching tool.
As a basic example, Duke professor Daniel Foster has students listen to radio shows from 1920 to 1960 on their iPods for his “Radio: Theater of the Mind” course. And because the best way to understand something is often by doing it, Foster also has his students create their own “radio shows.” Making sure they understand the various elements that go into a radio show to give it the full effect (pauses, voice inflections, sound effects, and the musical score), students record their own parts and then edit them together using audio editing software. Some gifted students even take things a step further, such as Tiffany Chen, who adapted the short story “The Most Dangerous Game” and did a solo radio production, using editing software to alter her voice for the male parts.
iPods get used in more technical classes as well. In the lab class for “Computational Methods for Engineering,” students work with 10 second snippets of songs from their iPods. The iPods are wired to circuit boards attached to computers. The students learn how to manipulate the sounds – breaking out individual frequencies, boosting and lowering the frequency ranges and scrambling pitch and beat. By using the iPods, no money needs to be spent buying special signal generators, and the music helps connect the engineering principles the students are learning to a familiar experience.
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