Zune As Teaching Aid? What's Next? Handphones?

Now here's an interesting teaching approach. Using Zune as a teaching aid? Laughable right? It's almost as if handphones were used as teaching aids! But seriously, this is what happened in a rural school down in New Mexico.

Almost all the roughly 100 students at Fort Sumner High School and 25 at South Valley Junior High in Liberty, Mo., were outfitted in February with the Microsoft Corp. gadget - Zune, which for those who don't know (not surprising considering they're not really popular here in Malaysia), is a media player that plays songs, videos and displays pictures.

Yes, this is the Zune..but seriously they lack Apple's Ipod in both popularity and style...xD

Apparently, the idea was to have the devices on during class hours, bus rides home and school trips and listen to podcasts that were related to the subjects being taught or those created by the teachers themselves.

And the best part? A teacher proposed the whole idea! Woah! I'm waiting for one of ours to pitch the idea of using handphones as teaching aids. Now that would be something to shout about!

You've realy got to envy those darn American kids. No school uniform, relaxed rules, flexible syllabus, relaxed teaching environments, and now this? But of course, this is just a test case and has not been implemented nationwide, so I suppose it's really nothing to get excited about. Realistically, I think this is more of a marketing gimmick for Microsoft to boast their lagging Zune sales. And knowing students, most probably would be using it to listen to their favourite tunes, swap pictures or watch some movies instead of using it for the educational purpose it was meant to be in the first place.

To sum it all up, here's what the school's superintendent Patricia Miller has to say.

"Is it the next great thing? I don't know. Maybe. But it is another tool."

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