Maximize Your iPod for School

Sunny days are over and rainy season is here. What does that symbolize for all students out there? It’s back to school once again. Have you gotten your new notebooks, bags, pens, and gadgets to show off to your classmates?

Perhaps some of them have gotten an iPad, while you only have your good old laptop and an iPod. So what? Things need not be new, as long as you find some use to it. In fact, your iPod is not just a music or video player; there’s more to it than that.

Read up and share to your friends as we list down some great ways you can use your iPod for school. These features are just actually sitting on your gadget, but may not have been given importance due to the focus on just music and videos.

External HDD Alternative – Student life will surely squeeze out brain cells and require lots of documents. If you own an iPod Classic that has 120GB to 160GB storage space, it can be a handy alternative to an external hard drive for backing up files. All you have to do is connect it to the computer and select “Manually manage music and videos” or “Enable disk use” in the Devices tab of your iTunes.

Portable Slideshow Viewer – Showing photos of a recent trip to your friends? Lugging a photo album or even having pictures printed is such a hassle. The Classic or Touch can store up to 25,000 digital photos, making sharing very light, portable and more techie. To add to that, you can also export PowerPoint presentations as an image and enable yourself to browse through slides when you want to study or review while on the go.

Calendar Organizer – Group works and org meetings take a huge chunk of a student day-to-day routine. Be sure to watch out for schedule conflicts by keeping an organized calendar. While iPod Classic and Nano have limited calendar functionalities that you have to sync, iPod Touch has a wide array of options to view, add and remove meetings.

Notes and Numbers Master – When you’re stuck in a math class and realized you’ve left your calculator at home, the iPod Touch comes to the rescue. Holding it vertically, you’d get a classic pocket calculator that handles basic operations. Turn it to its side and you’d instantly have a scientific calculator for more complex computations.

Another useful function is its notepad feature, where you can jot down basic notes and information in cases where you don’t have a pen and paper. You can create unlimited number of notes, so you’d never have to worry about having to delete old ones.

Lecture Recorder – In a one hour class, there’s definitely a lot of lectures done by your professor. If you’re not quick enough to write down key points or having a hard time remembering small details that might come out in exams, use your little gadget to record lectures.

iPod Touch has a built-in recorder that can instantly capture sounds and later on be used for sending to classmates. Meanwhile, using an iPod Classic or Nano takes a bit more effort. You would need to purchase an attachment (e.g. Belkin’s Tunetalk Stereo) to transform it into a voice-recording device.

Looking back at the olden days, we used to be contented with a few books, some pens and pencils, and a single binder. Today, technology has taken its many forms and changed the way we look and handle things. Maximizing the use of your iPod does not only give you value for money, but also helps you save on several devices that work similarly as with your lightweight and portable Apple best friend.

This article is my twentieth contribution to Manila Bulletin -- one of the Philippines' leading broadsheets -- published on July 01, 2011 (Friday) in the quarterly supplement 'Digital Generation.' You can view the PDF version at Page 28 here.