Serendipity35

APPLE iTunes U EVENT - July 12, 2006 at NJIT

iTunes U is a free, hosted service for colleges and universities that provides easy 24/7 access to your course content, lectures, interviews and university promotional and informational audio or video.

After the classic "Continental Breakfast", the morning started with an introduction from Sheri Prupis, NJEDge.Net Educational Technologist. The morning was devoted to using podcasting in an educational setting. 

The first session was done by Dave Marra, Apple Senior Systems Engineer. He talked about recent changes at Apple (Intel chips, MacBooks, Boot Camp) and gave some general podcasting background. The majority of his talk was about iLife tools - iMovie HD 6, iChat AV, Garage Band - that allow the best integrated package to create, upload and distribute your podcasts.

I did the next session. NJIT has recently been accepted as an iTunes U school and is in the process of creating its iTunes U "Music Store" for use this fall (though we are actually hoping to be up & running by August). What I talked about was the path that brought us to being an iTunes U school. That began in May 2005 with the explorations of the Instructional Technology & Media Services staff at NJIT (I was a part of that department until just this month) into using podcasting & RSS to distribute audio and video content. This led to a podcasting pilot project that involved six faculty memebers who were willing to use podcasting for their fall and spring classes. You can view a PDF of my presentation. (I guess I should make a podcast of it though...)

Lester Ray, Apple Market Development Executive, talked about some pedagogical approaches to using podcasting.

The morning closed with some comments on Apple education purchasing offers from Amanda Diesel, Apple Education Account Executive for NJIT and other area schools.

For those of you who think this technology is too much for your campus or faculty, check out the 4th grade podcasting project from a Mount Laurel, NJ school. And they did enhanced podcasts, not just audio mp3's. I found them on the Apple Learning Interchange site.