Maroon 5 Makes Room on the IPod for Schoolwork By Mark Glassman New York Times December 9, 2004 For Samantha Greene's parents, there was no getting around it: she had to have an iPod this year. Everybody at school was getting one. At the Brearley School, a private school for girls on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where Samantha is in the eighth grade, the iPod went from a "want" to a "must have" this year when its use was incorporated into foreign-language and classics courses. For about 300 girls in grades 7 through 12, the iPod is now required to do homework and classroom assignments. The 20-gigabyte iPod required by the school sells for $299 at stores but was made available to students for $269 through Brearley with Apple's education discount. Nonetheless, only 117 students purchased the device through the school, and 95 rented it from the school at a cost of $50 per year. The rest owned them already. Stephanie J. Hull, head of the school, put the program in place and is an avid iPod user herself. "It's undeniably attractive," Ms. Hull said of the iPod. "It's not pedagogically sound as an argument, but it does help." While Apple says Brearley's mandatory-iPod program is the first it has heard of at the secondary-school level, there have been comparable efforts at universities. This fall Duke issued an iPod to each of its 1,650 incoming freshmen and has tried to incorporate the device into several courses, including music, language and engineering. Last year, Georgia College & State University began lending the devices to students for use in several humanities courses. At Brearley, students use the iPods predominantly in interactive exercises. Last week, two students in Roberto Lazo's tenth-grade Spanish class were asked to read sections of a poem into iTalk microphones, devices compatible with the iPod that let users make digital recordings. "Empieza," he told Nina Cochran, 15, one of the readers. "Make sure that it is on." Six other students in Mr. Lazo's class took live dictation, then listened to the tracks to check their work. In Jian Gu's Mandarin course that afternoon, one student played snippets of her Chinese diary entry, while another student translated it aloud. Three advanced students transcribed the recording in Chinese characters. As the class ended, they all listened to Chinese rhythm and blues. Ms. Gu said she asked students to record diaries in Mandarin because there was educational value in stumbling through awkward moments when speaking. "To learn a language," she said, "you shouldn't be afraid of making mistakes." Jacques Houis, a French teacher at Brearley, said the iPod kept his students engaged. "The ability to vary what you're doing is important for maintaining interest," Mr. Houis said. Other teachers at Brearley agreed. "That 'wow' factor for a middle-school girl is such a great hook," said James Mulkin, the head of the classics department. Some students said that trendiness aside, the iPod has helped their foreign-language skills. "You get more of a sense of how people actually speak," Samantha Greene, 13, said, as she dragged the audio files for Chapter 4 of her French textbook from the school's academic server onto her iPod. Twenty new tracks of French appeared in her iPod library, just beneath three songs by OutKast. The long-term efficacy of the iPod as a language aid has, of course, not been established. "I don't necessarily see a correlation between using the iPod and an increased fluency in the language," said Lisa Merschel, who teaches a Spanish class at Duke in which students use the device. Nonetheless, when Ms. Merschel asked students to record a diary using the grammar, phrases and vocabulary they had learned over the course of a week, "I think that really helped me to see how they were progressing as a class," she said. The iPod initiative at Brearley began as a gift from last year's graduating class. Bicky David, a graduate who led the effort, said she was inspired to improve the school's foreign-language equipment after a summer studying in France. Speaking of the iPod program, Ms. David said in a telephone interview from Harvard, where she is now a freshman, that she "was kind of disappointed that there was nothing here like it." A panel at the school reviewed several options before deciding on the iPod. "We started out looking at the classic language labs," said Katherine Hallissy Ayala, the head of the computer education department. "They were all kind of expensive and required desktops, and most of them ran on Windows." Brearley uses mostly Macs. Ms. Ayala said the school also wanted more flexibility than typical language labs offer. "The out-of-the-box systems, they're great in that you don't have to develop your own content," she said, "but at the same time, you can't develop your own content." Several instructors at Brearley have uploaded songs and audio books in foreign languages to supplement the audio materials that come with their textbooks. "Listening to many different types of French, not just the teacher, is very important," Mr. Houis said. He said his students enjoy listening to modern music, including songs by the French rapper M C Solaar. "He's very literary, very high quality," Mr. Houis said. Ms. Ayala said that sort of real-world content could encourage students to use their iPods more often. "The hope is that if students are interested in this, they'll download and explore on their own without being told to," she said. She added, "Of course, through this process, we thought, 'Well, wait a minute. Is this all legal?' " The school developed internal rules to comply with usage laws. Students are asked not to share their school materials with people outside the classroom, and must delete audio files when they are done with them. For parents, the hope is that the iPod will become more than just the new graphing calculator: an expensive piece of hardware required for their children's homework. Pria Chatterjee, the chairwoman of the Brearley parents' association, who bought the device for her daughter, an eighth grader, said that although some parents were concerned about "flashy" gadgets, most trusted the faculty's enthusiasm. "Obviously, parents should be concerned about any additional expenses," Ms. Chatterjee said, "but the iPod is not the deal-breaker here."