Apple iPod Touch Getting Started - Page 26

Getting Started with iPod touch: 26 A guide for using iPod touch and iTunes for teaching and learning Providing Customized Content for Individual Students If you want to provide specific content for individual students, you can do this by creating separate playlists in iTunes. You could set up one student group account to sync all content to one main iTunes library as described in the previous section. You can then provide individualized content for each student by creating a playlist for that student that contains specific items to be used by that student. If you set the iPod touch devices to sync manually, you can drag each student's playlist to the iPod touch he or she will be using. Playlists can also be used for special projects or for organizing content by subject. To create a new playlist in iTunes: 1 Choose File > New Playlist, or click the Add button (+) in the bottom-left corner of the iTunes window. 2 Type a name for the playlist. 3 Click Music (or another item below Library) and then drag an item to the playlist. To select multiple items, hold down the Command or Shift key while you click. Another way to provide customized content for each student is to create one user account for each student using the computer. Although such accounts take longer to create initially, this is a good way to provide privacy for student work saved on the computer. You may also want individual accounts when students need special settings on the computer to accommodate learning or other disabilities. iTunes and iPhoto libraries would be unique to each student account, and the iPod touch devices would be synced for individual student content using this type of setup. Providing Separate Content for Each Class If you have multiple classes using the same computer, you could set up one user account for each class. If students save their work to individual computers rather than to a server, separate class accounts would make it faster for students to locate their work because the account would only include work saved by students in that particular class. Each class account would have its own iTunes and iPhoto libraries, applications, and other synced items, which would allow the content to be different for each class, such as one account for first year French and another for AP French. This would allow you to sync the iPod touch devices with the content needed for each class. Providing the Same Content for All Students If you want all of your classroom iPod touch devices to contain the same content, one way to do this is to set up a computer with two user accounts-an administrator account for you and one student account that all students share. With this setup, a student using the computer would log in with the student group username and password. You would log in to that computer using the administrator account. All of the students would share a common iPhoto and iTunes library, iPod touch applications, bookmarks, email setup (if any), and so on. When an iPod is synced with the computer, the content from the shared student account's iTunes and iPhoto libraries and other items to be synced would be loaded onto the iPod touch. Many teachers find setting up a single student user account for use with classroom sets of iPod touch to be the easiest way to manage and distribute content. If the classroom has an Apple iPod Learning Lab (see "Mobile Learning with the Apple iPod Learning Lab"), you can sync 20 iPod touch devices to one MacBook simultaneously.