I took a visit to the Hong Kong Electronics Fair yesterday both to inform myself of what was going on in the consumer electronics field that might be of interest to educators and to see if there were sources for some of the things in use in International Schools that were a lot more efficient than traditional channels. An example being that you still can’t buy a Flip Video camera here in electronic crazy Hong Kong!

I have to say it was mostly a waste of time as I saw little of great interest to educators. One thing I did get to check out, however, was a range of options for recording sound onto the 2g iPod Touch. Some readers are probably aware that there were some good, albeit expensive, options for recording sound, like podcasts, onto the original iPod and the 2g iPod Nano using things like the Belkin TuneTalk shown opposite. As I did not have an original iPod, I used a MiniDisk recorder which died. I have recently bought a new iPod touch but was very dissapointed that I could not easily record to it. After some searching around I discovered that you can actually record to it by downloading something like VoiceNotes from the iTunes Apps Store (basic version is free) and you can sync these files back to your computer using VoiceNotesSync.

The problem that you still have is that you still need a microphone input as there is no mic on the iPod Touch and it is not immediately obvious that the 2g iPod Touch supports a mic. Some hunting around will tell you that it does. What is more, I found some helpful earphone and mic suppliers yesterday who were able to demonstrate that a great range of mics out on the market can be used for recording to the 2g Touch.

Good news for teachers looking to use these versitile machines in the classroom!