iPods in the Classroom, part 2

Hello everyone,

A few weeks ago I started to write a little note on the student misuse of ipods in the classroom. When I heard the news about Virginia Tech, I decided not to write what I was going to write, thinking that it was so banal.

It's still sort of banal, but I'm ready to return to it.

Frankly speaking, if students have earphones in their ears, they aren't listening to you. If you don't think that what you say is important enough to have students listen to you, you need to reconsider your lesson plans.

If you allow something that is not allowed in the general school rules, then you send the message that it is all right to disobey rules, and you put yourself in a very bad position.

Still, let's speak practically about, say, the possibility that some of you allow your students to listen to ipods during individual practice because it keeps them docile. Let's say that the students actually do their work while listening to their ipods. Just be conscious of having some sort of signal that causes all of them to remove the earphones and pay attention to you right in the middle of their favorite track. Don't talk until you're certain that they are listening. You're not really accomplishing anything if you just chatter away, thinking they're listening to you, when half or all of their ears are plugged with headphones playing music.

Let's say you disagree with the school rule that students should not have electronic devices. Check with Mr. Del Cueto or Mr. Lopez, and find an appropriate way for you to have an exception. Or work to have the rule rescinded. (It used to be that cell phones were the province of only drug dealers; now parents want to be in touch with their children and almost everyone has one. It became necessary to change the rules governing them.) This official permission under limited circumstances allows you to have an exception without giving an endorsement of willful violation of a set rule.

On the other hand, you can use the ipods for educational purposes. If everyone has an ipod (something possible in the near future), you can podcast lessons, speeches, and other public domain recordings and require the students to listen to them.

Even so, however many good uses an ipod may be put to, you must still insist that, when people are talking to each other in your class, students must remove their ear pieces and listen.

We certainly want to teach them to listen when people speak. If that's the only thing they learn from us (and let's hope it isn't), it's not a bad thing to learn.

Jeff Combe