Current Article All Articles About the Author Q&A Podcasts Teachnology Blog

Between January and March of this year, Apple Computer sold 807,000 iPods. An iPod is a pocketsize device that can store and play thousands of songs saved in a digital music format. Your students know it as an MP3 player, even though the songs are not actually saved in the MP3 format any more. iPods, and devices like it, are everywhere. Apple alone reports that sales of its device increased 900 percent over the last year. The price of the information-storing devices drops precipitously as economies of scale and healthy competition work their magic.

What does all this have to do with teaching and technology?

About a year ago, my iPod arrived in the mail. My daughter put a few songs on it for me. The machine worked well, the music sounded good, and it was small and elegant. But listening to music through headphones is not a big part of my lifestyle, so the iPod languished in my backpack. But this all changed on the day I confronted in my lab Phyllis, the frustrated film student.

Phyllis had been at work for hours in the back row, editing her masterpiece on one of our computers. But it was 9:00 PM, time for me to go home and for the lab to close for the night. "Okay, save your work and get ready to go home," I announced, standing at the front with my backpack in my hand, ready to lock the door and depart. The students dutifully saved their web sites, films, videos, designs, animations and photo essays to their Zip disks and memory sticks. All except for Phyllis. "It won't save," she lamented. Going over to help, I asked her how big her project was. She checked the file size: 3 gigabytes. This was quite a film she was producing. "What are you trying to save it on?" I asked. "My Zip disk." was her reply. "How much can a Zip disk hold?" I asked in my teacherly way. "I dunno, a hundred megabytes?" offered Phyllis. "Now do you see the problem?" Phyllis began to worry in earnest.

The next day was Saturday, and we expected a group of high-school journalism students to be using the lab, so we had to get Phyllis' film off that computer and saved somehow. Dividing it up into 30 Zip disks was out of the question. Copying 3 gigabytes to the server would take at least an hour, and Phyllis did not have that much space in her allocation. Leaving it on the hard disk of the computer risked certain erasure by the undisciplined adolescent hordes that would descend on the lab in the morning.

Then I remembered the iPod. "Let's try this," as I connected the iPod to the computer. Up popped its icon on the desktop. Under Get Info I saw that it has 4 gigabytes available. I copied Phyllis documentary to the diminutive iPod. All saved in less than three minutes. Phyllis agreed to acquire her own mass storage device over the weekend, and come back on Monday to retrieve her masterpiece from my iPod.

Since that day, I have used my iPod regularly to store and back up my work. I haven't listened to a song in a long time. But I have transferred very large files, especially video and multimedia projects and web sites, from computer to computer (and from country to country) on the snappy little device. Today I will copy all my important work files to the iPod so as to maintain a backup copy.

As students and teachers produce more multimedia work, large-scale web projects, and rich presentations, they encounter the need for mass storage, methods for saving and transferring these enormous files. The iPod is but one among many of the modern ways to store large amounts of digital data. Here are some of the others:

Floppy disk. Just about useless these days, given that any student project much bigger than a book report (without pictures) will exceed it's 1.4 megabyte capacity. Many of the new computers no longer contain a drive for these disks. And at almost a dollar per megabyte of storage, they are relatively expensive.

Zip disk. These are overgrown floppy disks that hold 250 megabytes, enough for a hefty web site or a short video editing project. At $25 each, the cost per megabyte is about ten cents. But not every computer comes with a Zip disk.

CD-R. These hold 600 megabytes, can be had for less than a dollar, and more and more computers include drives that read and write these discs. So the cost of storage is about one-tenth of a cent per megabyte. It's better to use CD-R (burn only once) than CD-RW (write and rewrite data) because the latter are not fully compatible across computers and cost more.

USB memory stick. These keychain-size devices plug into the USB connector on your computer and can hold up to 16 megabytes for $20, a gigabyte for $400. While they would not handle Phyllis' film, they are big enough to store most of the projects a student or teacher might build. And they make transferring files very easy.

Pocket firewire drives. That's what the iPod is, a small hard drive that connects to the computer through a firewire cable. My old iPod holds 5 gigabytes, the new ones 15, and at $300 that's two cents per megabyte, less than the USB memory stick. And you can find other pocket drives, without music-playing capability, for even less.

Phyllis the film student returned on Monday, with her new pocket firewire drive. By now I am sure she is working in Hollywood or on location somewhere in the world, with her mass storage in her pocket. As we move into the multimedia digital age, we all need to consider how to store, transfer, and save our educational files. These technologies and products are developing quickly, and dropping in price, and are becoming more valuable to us every day.

For more on the iPod and other digital storage devices see the archives of Gadget Gal's columns on this site.