I broke down this past weekend and bought a cheap MP3 player ($70 Canadian for 128MB flash based player which doubles as a USB drive), mainly to listen to all the podcasts I’ve been listening to. This has made me a much more productive person, since I can now walk around the house while listening to my daily dose of 2 hours of podcasts. But I actually found a use today that justifies the expense as a teaching tool.
In my grade 11 biology classes, we were talking about bioaccumulation and bioamplification of pollutants. I had heard a short report on CBC Radio‘s Quirks and Quarks about chemicals that were found in the fatty tissue of polar bears, and mentioned it briefly in class. I found that the report I had heard, along with the past few seasons of Q & Q are available online. I downloaded the file at home, transferred it onto the MP3 player, then hooked the MP3 player up to a pair of powered speakers I have in my classroom.
I mentioned this to a colleague of mine, who is also our school division’s multimedia and technology coordinator. He asked why I didn’t just play it off of the computer in my classroom. This is a valid point, but I like the portability of the MP3 player, and it gives me the chance to prepare the audio clip at home by editing if I need to. I also don’t need to worry about the internet connection in my classroom lagging or shutting down right when I’m using it in the class (as always seems to be the case).