Ipod Touch Reflection

After reflecting on my experience with my Ipod touch in the classroom, I have mixed feelings.  I really liked the opportunity to explore and test out new and fun ways to integrate the Ipod Touch in the classroom, but I found this harder than anticipated.  In a previous post, I had mentioned that I felt unsure how to utilize the Touch in older graders verses younger grades.  This opinion might be skewed though because of my experience with my own younger child and all the uses I have found for him. As a result, I have thought a lot about this, and realized that it might have been easier if I was told exactly how to use the Touch. I generally like the freedom to explore and find solutions without directions, but in this case I feel that I was unable to fully take advantage of this technology because I did not know how to integrate it into my 5^th grade classroom.  As a university class, we discussed some of the issues that arose for us, and someone brought the idea of using the Touch with only one student and not the other 25.  Our professor made the good point that many classrooms don’t always have class sets of each resource such as dictionaries; therefore, the argument of using this technology when not every student had access at the same time needs to be disregarded.   Overall, I still feel that I would have benefited from more instruction of best practices and uses for this amazing and potentially helpful form of technology.