I’ve already written about how you can easily use an iPod to turn reading fluency assessments into a tool for students to review and self-assess their own reading as well as allowing you to keep recordings of readings to review and play for parents at parent conferences. See previous post.

If that seems like too much for you, here are a couple of other suggestions that will turn your classroom into a media powerhouse:

By importing your Open Court selections on CD into a remote controlled iMac, you can select any Open Court selection by remote from across the room and have it begin to play. This ends searching for CDs, rewinding tapes, and the misbehavior that ensues as a result.

Without the computer, you can use your iPod in the same manner, to store and easily select stories to play for the class.

Searching the internet, easily finds speeches by famous people such as Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, and FDR. You can download these speeches, have them on your iPod and easily call them up at appropriate times in the curriculum.

Free public domain videos are available from archive.org and elsewhere on the internet.

If you have the budget, you can subscribe to Discovery Channel’s United Streaming which has tons of excellent material you can download and put on your iPod

Your iPod easily connects to any set of cheap speakers or a classroom TV. No projector is needed or recommended.

Ideally, you have realia to go with each of your Open Court units but for those times when you can’t bring in a T-Rex or resurrect Abraham Lincoln, today’s technology makes it so easy to have an enormous store of audio and video resources in your pocket to enliven your lessons. The Concept/Question Board, student writing, and class discussions all come much easier if you provide the students with something they can look at, hear, or touch. This is particularly vital for students’ who enter your classroom with very little background knowledge.