Filed under: iPod Family
NYT on iPods for language learning
The school district in Union City, NJ doesn't have the resources of more affluent suburban districts, according to an article in Monday's NYT (free registration req.). What it does have is a large population of students who speak Spanish at home and who need a new approach to bilingual education. The solution? iPod to the rescue. Kids in ESL classes get pop songs and lyrics (in English) on the iPods to kick-start the language learning process. The program has been so successful that parents are requesting the iPod-enabled classes and more iPods are on the budget for next year; meanwhile, the kids in the iPod language classes are described as "Pod People" by fellow students.Interestingly, the school has an extremely strict ban on student-owned iPods on the premises, confiscating several each week (to prevent distraction and cheating). Clearly the iPods wield a double-edged set of white headphones. Got your own iPods in education story? Let us know below.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
jonathan ober said 10:48PM on 10-11-2007
I believe it was on the oday show that military are using iPods with different language tranlations programmer into them to aid in road side checks in the middle east. Apparently they have sign language pictures on the too to help gesture to civilians.
I use my iphone to play music to put my month old daughter to sleep.
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Michael Rose said 12:22AM on 10-12-2007
Jonathan, you may have seen that here:
http://www.tuaw.com/2007/10/10/ipod-being-used-by-army-as-arabic-translator-in-iraq/
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Some Guy said 2:37AM on 10-12-2007
iPods for translations is a cool idea. I like this site:
http://www.mp3translations.com/
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Jonathan Nalder said 5:16AM on 10-12-2007
There has been an ongoing debate about iPod use in schools for some time -some say they are great because they're familiar and so ubiquitous, others say there no good because they are so limited compared to PDA's.
You can read more about this debate by doing a search for ipod at http://www.mlearnxyz.net.
The best resource site for ipods in education is http://www.learninginhand.com/ipod/index.html
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Sven said 12:59PM on 10-12-2007
Just hoping that the kids aren't given Bob Dylan or something, imagine a generation of kids learning English with that long drawl through each word.
Didn't we learn any thing from 'Better Off Dead'?
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Mark said 3:59PM on 10-13-2007
I talk a lot about this on my http://www.mp3languagelearning.com site - basically the way you learn is listen over and over to native speakers. I also talk on my blog about this. http://www.claritaslux.com/blog/ Basically if you use music for language learning or ipods or mp3 it all helps.
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Cedric said 3:59PM on 10-15-2007
I love my iPod, but it seems EXTREMELY cost ineffective. Even with an educational discount, spending hundreds of dollars a pop seems like a waste for a school district that doesn't have many resources. It would be a lot cheaper to buy a bunch of CD-Rs and even portable CD players. Since most people probably have a CD player in their homes, these portable CD players wouldn't even be necessary for every student. It just seems like such a waste of money.
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