At a time when banks are shedding IT roles by the dozen, it seems counter-intuitive that 83 per cent of the nation’s chief information officers should report they are confident about the future of their business to the extent that 45 per cent expect to hire IT staff in the first six months of the year. The question remains – is this a dead cat bounce?
Most people tend to think that the right thing to do is ban kids from using their iPods in class. However, a Hobart, Tasmania high school has become the first in Australia to do just the opposite and embrace iPodagogy as a teaching tool...
On 25th October 2005, the Gracemount High School
in Scotland handed out free iPods to teachers and a whole class of
students. The iPodagogy project was a bold experiment to determine what
the teaching, and indeed the learning, benefits of an iPod at school
might be.
Of course, the whole idea of
the educational iPod has been warmly embraced by Apple itself
which talks proudly of being able to "engage individual learners" and
"bring subjects to life."
An iPod and iTunes combine to allow
students replay lectures both in-class and at home, build language
skills and review tests. The multimedia experience is perfectly suited
to music, art and literature lessons, not forgetting a little sideways
thinking to embrace math modelling and science simulation in 3D.
Teachers
can even use mobile carts to manage and sync multiple iPod players, and
Apple has a whole mini-site
dedicated to lesson plans for the iPod.
Yet Australian schools would
appear to have missed the iPodagogy boat, until now that is. The
Rosetta High School in Hobart, Tasmania has become the first Australian
school to officially use iPods in the classroom as a teaching aid.
Better
late than never, I guess. At least the Tasmanian kids will now be able
to join the growing global iPodagogy movement.
The Rosetta High
students can record lessons and create project podcasts, as well as
have their assignments, lesson plans and school calendars pushed out to their
'pods.
Australian e-Learning outfit Etech has created the
software being used to integrate the iPod into the classroom
environment. Chief Executive, Geoff Elwood, says "It is a fun learning
environment for children and they enhance their learning capacity if
they are having fun."
Quite how you work around the problem of
kids listening to My Chemical Romance or playing a quick game of
Bejeweled when they are meant to be studying the rise and fall of the
Roman Empire is quite another matter...
Michelle Thomas
| Smelly Black Dog Internet is proud to announce that the company has signed up for Simtronic Technologies new wholesale broadband service as an…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
Latest Headlines from IT INDUSTRY
