SD card + Spirit = Unlimited Learning
4th in a series about the Future of Audio
Wouldn’t it be great to provide students learning materials that have been custom-prepared by you rather than the educational publishers? Wouldn’t it be convenient to take your audio curriculum or teaching materials with you from classroom to classroom without pushing an AV cart, lugging a heavy backpack, or even a folder?
Before answering this open-ended question, here’s a quick refresher of where this series has taken us so far. The first article in the series looked at the evolution of classroom media players and their formats while the previous article, “Varying the Speed of the Digital Age“, considered a specific feature that’s helpful for language learning. This article will focus on the merits of one of the most popular portable storage formats available today – the SD card. While pretty well institutionalized in cameras and cell phones because of its small footprint and (relatively) enormous storage capacity, the SD card hadn’t yet been integrated into a classroom media player until the Music Maker USB last year.
The Spirit SD Multimedia Player/Recorder is the next generation beyond the best-selling Spirit (1776) in that it too has integrated an SD card slot, enabling you to do lots more due to its SD card-related capabilities and functions. Here are some ways the Spirit SD can increase your efficiency and your students’ learning opportunities.
• Expanding Students’ Learning Opportunities – With the SD card as a way to play audio files in the classroom, your teaching material media is no longer limited to CD or cassette, it can be any audio files that you choose to save onto the SD card. Students get to explore a world of audio not necessarily published on typical discs by educational publishers.
Spirit SD shown with an SD card in use (not included)
• Empowering you to modify or update your teaching materials constantly – No need to spend time and effort on CD burning or cassette coping when you want to modify or update your audio teaching materials based on students’ progress. Simply delete old files and add new files to the SD card to provide students the specific resource they need to apply and focus on in the learning process.
• Recording from CD or USB flash drive to SD card – Spirit SD Media Player enables you to copy files from a CD or an USB flash drive to an SD card, which eliminates the need of your carrying, organizing, and managing multiple media in a classroom and helps preserving your original discs in a good condition. Most importantly, it allows you to concentrate on student progress and collect immediate feedback during class hours.
• Up to 2GB of audio curriculum can be transported among classrooms with ease – The Spirit SD is designed for classroom uses and is available at a low cost that fits school budgets. Multiple units of Spirit SD can be set up in classrooms located at different buildings, you and your colleagues who teach various subjects at different classrooms can take up to 2GB of material in an SD card with you everywhere effortlessly.
Does your current media player allow you to do all these? Spirit SD is ready to assist you by itself, or in four or six-student learning centers.
Read the next installment in this series.
