iPods in the classroom

I am happy to announce officially that in my TAP class this fall UVM will be lending all of the students 20g color iPods. This is the result of a $5000 Instructional Incentive Grant I received earlier this spring from the Center for Teaching and Learning, which is enough for iPods and iTalk microphones for 15 students. The College of Arts and Sciences recently came through with additional funding for me that will allow me to outfit all 21 students with iPods and iTalks.

This project will allow us to test this technology as a teaching tool that, hopefully, we will be able to deploy on a wider scale in coming years for courses that would most benefit from access to audio materials. I will be using the iPods in my TAP class on Canadian culture. In this class, which I’ve entitled The Great White North (a reference, of course, to cultural icons Bob and Doug McKenzie), we’ll be looking at Canadian literature, film, comedy, art, and media. Texts we will be using the iPods to access will include a wide variety of Canadian music, readings or lectures from important writers and thinkers, and excerpts from Canadian radio with a particular focus on comedy programs like The Dead Dog Cafe Comedy Hour, the Vinyl Cafe, and the Vestibules. Because in Vermont we also get CBC television, my students will also be watching a lot of Canadian TV!

Of equal importance will be what the students do with the iPods themselves. As TAP classes are intended to be writing-intensive, first-year seminars, I will be having students write and record audio essays that we will make available on the web as podcasts. One of their assignments will see them podcasting about their experiences visiting Ottawa for the first time. We’ll be headed there on a field trip late in October and it will be interesting to hear their reactions.

I’ll soon be launching a separate blog for the course, that will have the syllabus, student comments and assignments, and a discussion area, all of which are open to the general public. I’ll be using this space on my own blog to reflect as regularly as possible on how this great experiment is going. It’s taken a lot of time and energy to get all the technology lined up and to figure out how we will be using it to distribute content. Now, as the start of classes is only two weeks away, I am suddenly scrambling to pull together the content itself. It’s going to be wild ride!