iPods for ePortfolio storage

After Camp Apple, and the Duke University announcement about iPods for every freshman this fall, I realized that an iPod could be used to maintain a digital archive of student work and their electronic portfolio with lots of multimedia artifacts. Storage problems solved!

Of course, this should not be the only place a student's work is stored, but it is a very portable medium for organizing work, and will enable more efficient storage of large multimedia projects, especially during construction, when video is not compressed. Access to data on a firewire or USB 2.0 hard drive is much faster than on a network, CD-ROM or DVD.

I bought the Griffin iTalk microphone to go with my new iPod. The quality of the audio recording is marginal, better with my Radio Shack computer microphone that I can plug into the iTalk. At 8 Mhz, probably not the quality needed for digital storytelling. But with this add-on, learners could record self-reflections on their work; teachers could provide audio feedback to their students. I just bought the device last week, and haven't had a lot of time to play with it. Stay tuned!