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Smart Classroom
iPod Course Design
7/18/2007
Elmira College in New York, where he supports iPod usage in Spanish, French, Italian, and English as a Second Language (ESL) courses. He identifies two key benefits of using iPods for second language acquisition: First, he says, students can take their language practice with them everywhere; second, the ease of accessing and downloading podcasts makes integrating authentic content into the classes both possible and easy. Free, daily podcasts from radio stations such as Radio France bring current issues, culture, and people into course dialogues, and make listening to, speaking, reading, and writing language timely and almost natural. They make it possible to discuss current world events, including popular culture, in the students’ target language. This same authentic content, while initially something students can listen to passively, provides fodder and stimulus for conversation, diaries, interviews, and projects, all of which are productive, active, and engaged learning experiences. (Other uses of podcasting at Elmira include an open series of podcasts from the Center for Mark Twain Studies.)Planning for Compression, Storage, Training
As for design issues in using iPods, Fahs notes three interrelated issues that are important yet underappreciated: 1) compression, 2) storage, and 3) the support and training of faculty and students.
While it is very easy to record interviews, journals, and lectures on the spot, such files can be quite large. So part of the recommended faculty training and support includes instructions on the process of converting WAV files into MP3 files, and provides templates for the labeling and tagging of files. Of course, as course content explodes, search and retrieval needs also multiply—especially for language students. For ESL students, in particular, the ability to download lectures onto iPods and then easily retrieve the content for multiple listening opportunities, accelerates the facility with English and with note-taking skills, too.
At Middlebury College in Vermont, educators also are focusing on the use of the iPod for language study. One of their original projects involved reformatting content from previous language study formats such as audiocassette and CD, to the iPod environment. For language study, this often breaks down into the study of vocabulary, phrases, and dialogue. According to Alex Chapin, curricular technologist at Middlebury, some of the first design questions the technologists and educators tackled were concerned with the level of granularity of the files, and the type and amount of metadata.
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