iEducation

Sessions for us on Wednesday focused mainly on displaying content and creating applications on the iPod Touch and the iPhone. There have been over 40 million of these devices sold so far and over 50,000 applications have been developed just within the last year – many of which are free to download and use. As you would expect, educators from around the globe have been investigating how to harness this technology for education – in terms of management, teaching and learning. Examples range from using it to remotely access the college's Information Systems e.g. to allow a student/staff member to query details about a course, to developing applications which use the device as the primary delivery channel of the learning experience. Another interesting development over the last number of months is the increasing popularity of iTunesU which allows teachers to place content on iTunes. Students can then either watch it online or download it and play it on their iPod or other portable device. The obvious advantage that this has over using other online delivery mechanisms is that students are very familiar with the iTunes software and it provides them with a single portal for all their media – both entertainment and educational.

A key event for us on Wednesday evening, and indeed our trip, was the special education gathering organised by Apple. This invitation-only event brought together practitioners and Apple Education staff from all over the world and we had the opportunity to talk at length with those involved in many of the developments we had heard about over the week, including iStanford. One of our key goals for the trip had been to explore how BMC could get involved with Apple's iPhone Developer University Program in order to offer classes within our full-time and part-time course portfolio. The gathering afforded us the opportunity to discuss this directly with Apple and we had a great response - and an action plan to pursue upon our return.