As I said, Reinier and I were in the Apple Store Regent Street yesterday, mainly to have a look at the Apple Store, but also to have a look at the new iPods. Apple announced a complete update to their iPod lineup last week, most notably replacing the iPod Nano with a new smaller version and introducing a new iPod Touch that is based on the iPhone interface.

Although the iPod Touch was the big announcement, it isn’t available yet in store. Still, the iPod Nano and iPod Classic (the new name for the old style iPod) have gotten a few updates that really make a difference, so we had a look at those. I didn’t bring my camera so I don’t have any photo’s, I hope to get some of the iPod Touch once it’s in store.

The iPod Nano got the biggest update as it is now comes in a way smaller form factor and is able to play video. Bringing video to the entire iPod lineup (except the shuffle) is important to Apple as well as many other players like Podcasters. When I tried the new iPod Nano, I noticed that the video playback is “just fine” as it can only be so much impressive on a 2″ screen. Yes, the resolution is sharp and the playback is smooth, but I rather watch stuff on my Macbook if I can.

The iPod Classic and iPod Nano both got a new interface update, giving them both Cover Flow and a new split screen interface for certain views. We noticed that the iPod Nano is much faster in starting up and powering down than its predecessor, but somehow sometimes felt a bit slow in navigating and especially when scrolling through a whole lot of photos. Reinier noted that scrolling through photos is much smoother on his iPod Nano 2G.

To see if this scrolling went any smoother on the new iPod Classic, I looked one up and had a play with it. It’s way faster in the menu’s and the photo viewing, and I would even enjoy watching a video on it. Still, I noticed some performance problems when playing a song and scrolling through the Cover Flow at high speed. Somehow doing these things caused the music to “skip” repeatedly, but strangely we couldn’t repeat this skipping later on when we tried some other iPod Classics. Is this posibly a hardware defect or does it have something to do with the song I played?

In the end we really liked the iPod Nano as it is cheap, very portable (may I say it is a Shuffle competitor in size?) and the new Product Red color is very nice and funky. The ability to play video’s on it might seem trivial but it opens the world of Podcasts to those people who want to have something interesting to watch on the road. I am actually thinking of getting one myself, although I still love my Shuffle.

A while back I was at BarCampLondon2 where I held my talk about Education 2.0. During this talk and the rest of the day I got to talk with people that were either involved or interested in education. I had a small idea with some people to setup EduCamp in London. Unfortunately there is already an Educamp planned in June in Dublin so this plan was quickly canceled.

One idea that I did want to pursue was the idea of doing some freelance podcasting for education. I already did some screencasts in the time that Reinier and I were still working for Education Made Easy so it wasn’t that much of a big step. After a couple of weeks thinking it through and setting stuff up I present you: teachr.tv.

I wanted to provide some content before I started spreading the word, so when you go to teachr.tv now you will see that there are already 3 episodes available. There are a few plans for the next episodes but I am very open to ideas and suggestions. You can mail me at info@teachr.tv or send me interesting stuff to del.icio.us/teachrtv.

I noticed that making high quality screencasts is still a lot of work but the workflow on a Mac is definitely more efficient than it ever was on Windows. As if I wasn’t happy enough with that, teachr.tv was recently even reviewed in the EdTechTalk-podcast (thank you Jeff!).

---

The teachr.tv podcast episodes are available at the teachr.tv podcast page or directly via iTunes.