Who Cares About the Box?

What does this picture mean to you?

Yesterday one of the kids in my class needed to get online after she had finished her math assignment. A student was using one of our desktops working on a graph in Excel, another machine was tied up with a student writing a blog post. The eight students who bring in their own laptops from home all had them busy in various ways. She was frustrated. Another student sitting across the room listening in our conversation said to her, "Don't you have your iPod here?" Her eyes lit up and off to her locker she went. We hooked it up to the our classroom wireless network and she was soon off and running, finishing a last bit of research for an assignment on ancient Egypt.

The box matters less less. It is simply a channel.

My classroom is beginning to look more like a mish mash each day rather then a coherent arrangement of technology. I used to dream of the day when I would have 20 new white iBooks to work with. All of the students connected and sitting prettily behind their clean new boxes. Now I have two old desktops (2 others have died this year), the one tiny Asus laptop ( still waiting on my other 10), eight students who bring their own laptops from home in a rainbow of Dell, Gateway, Toshiba and Sony colours, as well as two students who now realize they can use their new iPods they got for Christmas as more then containers for music. We are still living in the days of no cell phone service here (although rumours abound of its impending arrival in the spring....) or I'm sure I would have them in class as well. The point is just that the kids and I are both realizing more each day that the technology is just a channel, a pipe, a point of access to what is really important; the connection, the information, the people out there.

Tags: ipod, classroom, wireless, information, access

Comments

[Heather Ross]

How did they do that with their iPods?

[Corrie Bergeron]

Call me a dunce, but ditto what Heather said. Oh - That's the new iPhone-without-the-phone, though, right? Not just any old iPod would work.

[Clarence Fisher]

Yep. This is the new iPod Touch. Comes with wireless and a pre-installed Safari browser. Very cool.

[John Maklary]

Clarence,

I've been a bit in awe of the new iPod Touch. The price is fairly reasonable and the portability is amazing. Imagine having a 1:1 initiative with these devices.

I love your comment that the actual box is not the priority. That's what I try to instill to my kids in my classroom. I have 30 machines in my classroom with a mix of environments (XP, OS X, and Ubuntu). There are a few skeptics of OS's that they are not familiar with so I encourage the kids to "play" with the ones they don't know as well to show them that their work can be done transparently and seamlessly no matter which platform they happen to be on.

But, oh how nice to have a classroom set of iPod Touches.

Sidenote: I really would like to see a built in still camera and microphone incorporated into the Touch... a 1:1 killer app!

[Matt Montagne]

Hey Clarence-
Really interesting post...I've come to the same conclusion about devices. It doesn't really matter what kind of device they have, as long as it has a browser of some sort. Of course the iPod touch and other light can't edit video, but we aren't always editing video with a computing device (although even this is changing-youtube allows you to do some basic editing right thru the browser!!). This is something we do a minority of the time.

Many people are not accepting of such a "mishmash" of connectivity devices in their classroom. With the myriad of learning styles present in a given classroom (or studio as you like to say!), I'm surprised we aren't more accepting of a wide range of connected devices/learning tools.

Standardization may have been important several years ago as schools were building networks and starting to get rolling with this stuff. However, standardization now makes less and less sense to me.

Cheers and good luck getting cell phone service in your area!

Matt Montagne

by the way, a few of my 8th grade students tested the eeePC for several days at a time (we purchased one for evaluation purposes)...they took it home and used it throughout the school day as well. They wrote quick reviews and they are posted below:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df86v9z9_113gh3hxkf5

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddn879hg_4fqn3pv3s

[jethro]

Great post. As I was reading it, I thought of my school setting:
--iPods - Banned completely
--Cell phones - Banned except during passing periods
--computers in our room? - "We want to do that in the next couple years" (right).

I would love to have a 1:1 classroom...even a 2:35 classroom would be nice, but that is sadly still a dream for me. My school has wireless all over the place, but that is for the teacher laptops. It would be great to have a bunch of iPod touches, just for the wikis, blogs, online docs, and any other simple stuff. And it would be much cheaper than getting a bunch of sleek Macbooks.

[Rob Wall]

I just picked up the iPod touch on the weekend, and it is a massively disruptive technology! I've spent more time using the wireless features - browser, youtube, maps and mail (yeah, I paid for the new programs) - than listening to music. I showed it to my daughter and she understood it instantly - "It's a little computer". Now she asks to see the iPod computer. It fits in my pocket, it has wireless, it has a browser. What else do I need? (Other than more sites writing some good stylesheets to make it look better on a small screen - I can see Google docs, but I want to be able to edit them as well!).

[Penelope Millar]

You're right, it's not about the box. This is a thought that needs to get brought up as often as possible.

I wish I could have my kids use their laptops-from-home or iPod touches! We got wifi this year because of the laptop carts but it's still the same incredibly locked-down network. You can't get online without using a network computer. So...no "rainbow of laptops" here. I keep thinking to myself, we're going about this whole tech-integration thing backwards. It's like, rather than tell students to bring pencils and we'll provide textbooks (but you gotta bring it every day), we decided to integrate ink technology by requiring everyone to use school-issued mechanical pencils, took out all the pencil sharpeners, and only allowed .5 lead.

Terrible analogy, except that I think we really need to start thinking about computers more like we think about pencils.