Thumann Resources

We know that Christa McAuliffe was not referring to the iTouch when she made that famous statement during her training for the early 1986 shuttle mission to the moon. Technology had come so far and she was preparing to be the first teacher to set foot in space. It was an exciting time. Ms. McAuliffe’s words have stuck with me all these years that I’ve been teaching and I revisited many of the articles written about her as I was waiting for my 32 gig iTouch to arrive. 

I’ve been teaching a session called “iPods in Education” for the Center at Rutgers University now for about a year. I’ve brought it into many New Jersey school districts as well as they begin buying iPods for their teachers and utilizing the iPods that their students already have from home. I love it! There are so many things we can do to integrate iPods into the classroom.

We spend the day checking out Discovery Education, Mogopop, iWriter, iTunes, RSS, Google Reader, Bloglines, Flickr-Storm, and many other sites and applications. But I’ve noticed over the last couple of months that in each of my sessions, there’s at least one person that either has an iTouch or an iPhone and I was unsure as to ALL the differences except the obvious - how they looked and the access to wi-fi.

Pictured to the left is my white, 30 gig iPod Video Classic, which I love. To it’s right is my new, black, 32 gig iTouch. Each stores music, video, pictures, will sync with my Outlook contacts and will store information in the notes section. Theoretically both should allow me to attach a voice recorder to record and store audio directly to the hardware, but my iTouch is not recognizing my Belkin TuneTalk Voice Recorder. Read here.

So…..there is an awful lot you can do with the iTouch that you can’t do with the Classic. Too much to write in one post, so I’ve decided to write a series, categorized by subject area. Since one of the teachers I worked with this year on podcasting and using iPods in the classroom happened to be a music teacher, I’ve decided to start with the category of music applications:

• iPhone Guitar Tuner 
  http://iphoneguitartuner.com/ - WITH SOUND  - Using Quicktime, asks the user to select from electric bass, guitar, the ukulele and a couple of others to tune your instruments
• Guitar Web App 2.2
  http://guitarwebapp.com/index.php - easy to navigate, includes key signatures and chord charts
• Guitar Chord Library
  http://www.mdmalin.com/webapps/chords/ - hold your iTouch upright to select and see finger placements for a guitar chord, turn it sideways for help
• Waterstone Chord Library 
  http://modguitars.com/chords/ - select the chords that you would like, and the iTouch will display the finger placements
• Digital Guitar Archive
  http://www.digitalguitararchive.com/mobile/-  Searchable database, but you really have to know what you are looking for. You can search by author, title or keyword, great if you are teaching music history or theory on the high school level
• MooCow Music
  http://moocowmusic.com/ (MooCowMusic:Band is still in Beta-test, and is not yet publically available.) The links listed below take you to a 3rd party app that you would need to download onto your iPhone or iTouch - but boy is it worth it.
  Drums: http://www.appsafari.com/utilities/3479/drummer-native/
  Guitar: http://www.appsafari.com/utilities/3478/guitarist-native/
  Piano: http://www.appsafari.com/utilities/2863/iano-native-piano/