Well the day has finally arrived and our ipod touches have been delivered to the school by RM. Unfortunately RM has run out of the 8gb versions so gave us 32gb and 64gb versions instead!!! Thank you very much. The syncing dock will be arriving next week which will make life a lot easier for setting things up and downloading apps.
I must confess here and now that i have never used an Apple product before so there will obviously be a learning curve for me in terms of getting used to the software and hardware.
My first impressions are that the Ipods look amazing! They really are a beautiful piece of tech and just from holding it and turning them on i realise why people love them so much. In terms of using them with children i may consider by some form of case to give them a bit of protection in a busy year 6 classroom.
The first thing i had to do was to download Itunes which proved very easy. I then set up an account so i could have a little experiment. I will be setting up a proper school account for all the machines in the future. One thing i noticed was that from setting up by account it took a while to receive a confirmation email from Apple, about 20 minutes. The email i received directed me to the site and asked me to login in. I did this but only to be told that i had not verified my account! I tried following the link a few times but to no avail. So i then copied it and pasted it into the web bar. This lead to a dialogue box coming up asking me to open itunes. I did this and was allowed to sign in. As i said i am a novice to using itunes and apple so this may have been something that itunes user would have known to do but its worth mentioning here for those who not do know.
One of the first things i decided to do was to add some music to the ipod. Due to difference in the files i have my music in and what ipods use it took quite awhile for the songs to be converted into wma files.
The next thing i found was that i could not put songs from my itunes onto my ipod. At first i could just not figure what to do so resorted to the classic solution of unplugging the usb and then plugging it in again. This propmted me to register the actual Ipod and then allowed me to sync the music i had put on the itunes.By doing this i was also able to add some apps that i saw in the apps store.
I think my major disappointment today was that i have not got the wifi set-up. This is not a fault of the ipod but due to the fact that i did not know the access code for the school wifi. I will try and set this up at home to see how it works and make better use of the features. I will also have a little play with some of the apps that i have downloaded.
Looking forward to an afternoon of playing with the ipod. Sometimes i think that for adults and children this is the best way to learn. I will certainly be planning to have a few sessions when they are introduced in class where the children can just play with them.
I hope to blog some more later today.
Regards
Chris
