iPodject

Didn’t I say the donator was offering twenty first/second generation iPods?

Tuesday I was out of school participating in a discussion on multicultural literature with Junko Yokota from the Center for Teaching through Children’s Books when my principal met with the local parent who was donating the iPods. When I returned she said she had a present for me and brought a bag of 20 fifth generation video iPods each with USB cords, clear plastic cases, and outlet adaptors! It took several minutes for the reality of the situation to sink in…

But when it did…oh, but when it did! The past week my mind went over and over again how I could use these iPods to fill the audiobook gap in our school library, but now the curtains parted and I had a working classroom set of 25 video iPods. This changes the game completely, as I told my co-grant writer, and there’s so much more we can do…

Regardless of these new possibilities, I talked with my Project Idea and co-grant writer about creating a video presentation on how we’re using the iPods and sharing this with the donating family. I also talked with them about the way he had restructured the basic menus for his pharmaceutical company. IF we could do the same thing it would rectify several of the problems I’ve had with the iPods in opening trials with the students.

The most important revelation from this opportunity: giving back and moving forward. The NEF grant we received was a seed that has now taken root at Beebe. As the project leader I want to push forward with the many ideas and make them reality for our school and our students. I set up a small meeting with the donator for tomorrow’s Open House to discuss his use and manipulation of the menu structure for the iPods. I’ve also ordered Tony Vincent’s revised Handhelds for Teachers & Administrators (2nd Edition) as well as ISTE’s Educator’s Podcasting Guide in hopes that they will complement our growing need for reference and ideas in these fields.

iPodject has shed its first leaves and has begun feeding itself. IF we can spare some of our remaining funds to order a few more iPods, we’ll reach a “true” classroom set of 30, opening a one-to-one experience with the handheld devices. These goals, and many others, are truly taking root and nurturing themselves. Pride doesn’t express my sentiment tonight.

Thanks to the promotion of our grant to the teachers and students, a community parent contacted me about donating iPods to our school! Next week, a local businessman and parent of Beebe, has offered to donate over 20 first/second generation iPods for iPodject. It is hoped that these iPods will be in working order, but also a cheap/easy way to actually check in/out audiobooks from the school.

In our original grant proposal, the five $250 video iPods were just too much responsibility to entrust to a Beebe student outside of the school setting. However, the donated, older iPods from this local parent/businessman would allow for the audiobooks to be checked out easily and without concern for loss!

The iPods are scheduled to arrive this week and I will challenge myself to look into constraints of the older models with our audiobook needs. Currently we have the audiobooks available from the grant for checkout:

+a variety of Dr. Seuss books

+a variety of Bernstein Bears books

+Magic Treehouse (books 1-10)

+Charolette’s Web

+Tale of Desperaux

+Eragon

+Harry Potter (books 1-6)

This donation is a HUGE celebration for iPodject and its goals. I offer my sincere thanks to the Beebe community and I will endeavor to make great use of these donations. IF any other local or outside community readers have iPods they would like to donate to the project, we will gladly accept your donations and I thank you in advance for thinking of us!

I’ve been working diligently in my spare time to get the iPodject Companion Site up and running, get teachers and students interested in using the iPods, and setting up a web log of the process. While I sometimes wonder if this blogging thing is really worth investing any of my precious time (2-6 AM this morning, unfortunately), I do see a benefit in sharing my progress for other educators experimenting with iPods in education. I can thank my online communications with Tony Vincent of Learning in Hand and Mark van ‘t Hooft of ISTE’s Handheld Special Interest Group for that.

Currently I’m working on actually getting the audiobooks onto my external hard drive. I’ve continually run into problems with iTunes defaulting back to my C Drive rather then the external drive. After a post on the Educational Technology Listserv Ed-Tech, Dan Craig replied with this:

“It’s kind of a pain, but I’ve been going through this since getting my first iPod. I’ve never wanted to store my collection on my laptop’s HD, so it’s on an external HD.

I do this with a PC, but I’m assuming it’s similar (if not the same) on a Mac.

1) Map the drive so you get the same drive letter each time you connect.
2) Open the iTunes Music Library.xml file in a text editor (in your iTunes folder)(it’s a good idea to save a backup version at this point).
3) Use find and replace to replace the current path (your C: drive) to the external drive. Just replace everything before the iTunes folder name.
4) Sometimes I have to restart iTunes to get it to load right. I’ve also had to clear the library in the past in re-import it (save a copy of the iTunes Music Library.xml file in another location prior to doing this).

Like I said, it’s a pain, but it doesn’t take that long to do.

Daniel A. Craig
English Instructor
Seoul National University
Foreign Language Education Center, Yongon Campus”

I truly appreciate this and I will give it a chance when I get back to my school this week. Of course I need to figure out how to “map a drive” since my district technical support analysts have done this previously.