I absolutely love my iPod Touch. We received a cart of the devices over the past year as part of the Power2Learn grant from the school district. I kept begging to get my hands on them, but they were confiscated by the math and science classes. This year, I have a few of my own to use with my students who were begging to use them all last year. I have downloaded a number of apps on the ones I will use in my classroom. The list of my favorites may seem a bit odd as I teach several very different subjects. I have Flashcards Deluxe, Adobe Photoshop CS4 Learn by Video, Key Whiz, American Dreams - Speeches and Documents in American History, the Kindle and Kobo readers, the Hubble app, the Louvre, Vocabulistic, a news reader (Newsie), and some games that I feel my students would enjoy and might actually stimulate their brains.
One thing I will be doing this year is adding video clips from National Geographic, History Channel, and Discovery Channel for my ESL students to get background information for their Social Studies and Science classes. The plan is to switch these short video clips out each week as the curriculum changes focus topics. This could easily be done in a library to give students some back up for their studies just by accessing the 6 or 9 week plans for the subject areas. I would love to see our libraries and teachers using these devices to support the curriculum and not just for games or one time uses in the classroom. Our students are very fluent with these devices and we need to lead them into the educational aspects available.
The use of your iPod Touches in your classroom sound wonderful. You do have an assortment of apps. I have 20 that we use in our library with students PK - 5 and the apps we use are also all over the map (much like the curriculum with PK - 5). I noticed you have the Louvre app. I have a fun app recommendation for you. It is called ArtLite (free - there is a more advanced level for $). There is a quiz, artist information, slide show - so fun to see so many periods of art history right there on my iTouch!
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