We here at DA love the educational potential of mobile devices.... in fact I'm working on an guide for an upcoming issue right now. Our columnists and bloggers Cathie Norris and Elliot Soloway specialize in this area. I've also written about school use of cell phones, digital cameras and digital video cameras and other mobile devices in the past.
Well the segment continues to evolve--I'm sure I don't have to tell you about the rapid advancement of smartphones--and today's announcement of the new iPod nano is a pretty interesting example. Apple has added a full motion video camera, microphone and larger screen to their minuscule MP3 player, available in 8GB (8 hours of footage or 2,000 songs) or 16GB (16 hours video or 4,000 songs) configurations. Pretty amazing to fit all that into such a tiny package for so cheap: $149 or $179.
So the possibilities are immense for the use of video and other multimedia in classrooms, but increasingly, instead of the old days of schools wondering how to afford thousand-dollar camcorders and deciding whether to trust them with students, here's another example, like smartphones, of advanced technology already owned by students and brought with them to school. What a shift!
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