ipod touch and the MLE project

About a month a go, I picked up two ipod touches funded by the CPIT academic research committee. Renaissance computing, the agents for Apple in NZ kindly provided two ipod touches (an 8G & a 32G) for the price of one 8G :) So I have been busy over the last week or so having a play to evaluate the potential for it’s use with various mlearning projects. Being away much of October has provided time while travelling to work with the ipod touch and to utilise and evaluate its many capabilities.

Comprehensive information is provided on the apple site for using itunes, the main way to transfer information between PC and ipod without going online. Unfortunately, the ipod touch touch does not run with the mobile learning engine plug in for Moodle but accessing our normal Moodle using a web browser has always been an option.

Good starting point to the 1000s of ipod touch apps plus here is one which includes an app to turn your ipod touch into a remote control for itune PC! This one includes the app video piggy to download youtube videos.

I also downloaded stanza to convert ebooks to read on the ipod touch with a good guide from this site on how to read ebooks on the ipod touch.

From the education point of view, there is itunes u for courses, top tips on using the ipod touch for learning by Jonathan Nalder, a teacher from Queensland and a slideshare ppt providing examples of using ipod touches in learning.

The user interface for the ipod touch is intuitive to use, picture and sound quality also good. At just under NZ$400 for an 8G ipod touch, it is an accessible mobile alternative to a desktop or smartphone. The many apps available, many free and most at an affordable price provides an indication for the future role of software on mobile devices. Apps are also a cinch to download and although many are little ‘play’ apps, many provide useful utilities to enhance productivity at work and learning opportunities.

Only bugbear is no camera/video but the ipod touch does have a good voice recorder. The new ipod nano has a video camera so maybe a video camera is going to be in the next model of the ipod touch?