You simply must have iTunes

I've often thought eventually I'll leave the Adirondacks for a college town, because in a college town you have access to all the intellectual and creative stimulation of a vibrant learning community. I'm re-thinking that because in the last month or so I've enjoyed talks by Thomas Friedman, Steve Jobs, Elie Wiesel, Bill McKibbon, Mike Krzyzewski, and William Sloan Coffin. I saw these talks via my laptop while sitting in my favorite chair in my living room. The talks were, respectively, at MIT, Stanford, The US Holocaust Museum, Wellesley College, Duke, and Yale. This is like TED to the tenth degree.

If you don't have iTunes yet, you must get it now. Go here and download it for free. You can use it to download music and audio books, as you probably know. After you download and launch the program go to the iTunes store and then iTunesU. There you'll find hundreds of resources you can use immediately in your course.

You can explore resources uploaded by many universities. Many colleges and universities place their course lectures online, in audio and/or video format. Say you're teaching chemistry. You can go to UC Berkeley's Chem 101 class and play for your students the lecture on the topic your studying. Maybe it'll supplement your teaching. If nothing else, it'll give you and your students a sense of what a college chemistry course will demand of its students. With iTunes you can team teach your course with tenured professors at some of the best known universities.

Better still are the resources in the Beyond Campus section (bottom right). The Holocaust Museum, PBS, the National Science Digital Library, and much more, are all there for you - free of charge.

Maybe you can start with a Power Search (top right). Type the topic your studying now (Huck Finn, atomic mass, climate change, etc.) or the general topic of your course (American Literature, chemistry, environmental science, etc.) and see what you get. I know you'll find something you can use to improve your teaching.

Use the comments section to share ideas for using iTunes. Happy browsing.