By Stephanie Gross
Staff Writer

There have been many new technological innovations introduced to Coppell High School, but not many of them have reached rankings in the top 10 on the iTunes chart.

For anatomy and physiology teacher Jodie Deinhammer, her two courses on the iTunes U app have become so popular that people around the world are tuning in to follow her class’s lessons.

“The course that I created and started in January of last year is an anatomy and physiology page. It’s like my class page and website,” Deinhammer said. “Anyone can subscribe to the class, and all of the class links, notes, and documents are on there in one place.”

With the iPads this year, applications such as iTunes U have made it much easier for students to access their documents and materials for the class. Instead of students having to keep up with all of their papers in a binder, they have it all stored in one place where they are easily able to get to what they need on a daily basis.

“The class page keeps everything organized, which is really great because you never have to worry about losing papers or anything like that,” senior Jasmin Hakeem said.

After going to a training in Austin last year, Deinhammer realized that iTunes U was something that she would find beneficial for her class, so she decided to try using it.

“With Apple, I went to a training for something else, and there was a group of teachers who created things on iTunes U for the superintendent’s association in Texas,” Deinhammer said. “We got together to create pages for Biology and English. We made a lot of teacher resources, and when I saw it that way I knew that I liked it and wanted to use it.”

iTunes U has been around since 2007 and has been mainly used for educational purposes. Users, mostly college students, can listen to podcasts and have access to video content and university lectures.

The app was introduced to CHS for teachers as a place to put all of their class content, assignments, and documents. This way, students are able to find what they need quickly and get their work done efficiently using technology.

“It is a good organizational tool because instead of looking all over the place for things everything is just in that one page on iTunes U,” Deinhammer said. “You can just download things and upload to google drive a lot easier. It takes some steps out of the process and the fact that it is a public class and anyone is able to subscribe to it.”

Deinhammer quickly found out that not only her students found her class page beneficial, but many learners around the world did as well.

At one point, her class page was ranked number two on the iTunes charts. In fact, both pages that Deinhammer has created on iTunes U have been in the top 25 on the charts multiple times.

“It is ridiculous that our class page has the amount of subscribers that it does. There have been so many that Apple has called me,” Deinhammer said. “I didn’t realize that so many people had subscribed to a class that they were not even taking.”

After creating her first class page, Deinhammer then made a second course for her students to interact with and create content for called Health Without Borders. Creating projects for around 22,000 subscribers, every six weeks Deinhammer’s anatomy students can create a variety of different types of media for the page, and the best projects are submitted and uploaded onto the page.

“This six weeks we are writing a childrens book on the heart for kids who are in kindergarten through fifth grade,” senior Savannah Armes said. “We created a character and have him travel through the heart and show all of the different places and functions of the heart as well.”

Health Without Borders is mainly geared towards kids who are in elementary school. They are able to interact with the course while learning about different subjects in regards to science.

“Our kindergarten classes rotate science classes so I got very familiar with the program,” Cottonwood Creek Elementary kindergarten teacher Torrin Garrison said, “Her classes also make challenges for the younger students, like how to make yourself healthier and the kids could post ideas and comment and then either Mrs. Deinhammer or her students would respond, it was a really neat way to connect.”

Instead of having students sit at a desk and take notes all period, Deinhammer has her students constantly thinking of new ways to teach younger students in a fun, new and creative light. Not only do the younger kids get to learn about the human body, but Deinhammer’s students are learning different applications through technology that will become useful in the future.

“The quality of work that it coming in is very good,” Deinhammer said. “They are all very competitive with each other and want to do it well. I think a lot of people have learned from using the course and they have learned a lot about how to publish, things you don’t really think about learning but are very important.”

New technology has given Deinhammer a chance to take what she has done in class and incorporate it online where elementary classes are able to have easy access and use it often.

“My kids really seem to like learning digitally from the iTunes U course because Mrs. Deinhammer and her students offer such a wide variety of things to do and ways for them to interact and appeals the them in a lot of ways,” Cottonwood Creek Elementary first grade teacher Kim Spence said.

Before Deinhammer began using iTunes U, Spence’s first grade class would take a fieldtrip to CHS and participate in experiments that the anatomy classes would conduct. Now with iTunes U, teachers like Garrison and Spence have easy access and can show their students what is on the course much more frequently.

“It’s engaging on both levels. Her students are able to teach it while are students are able to learn it,” Garrison said. “I am very impressed on how mature her students are that make all of these fun things for our kids to do.”

Deinhammer’s students have been extremely creative and come up with different ways to interact and teach younger kids about what they are learning.

“We have a popular story called Simon the Science Cat who goes on different adventures,” senior Maddie Trout said. “These are a series of books that we create and someone in our group illustrates the pictures and then we have a comic book creator where we put all of the dialogue for the story.”

Stories such as Simon the Science Cat have exceeded the boundaries of the United States. Their popularity has reached other countries all around the world where students are able to subscribe to Deinhammer’s page.

“I started getting weird emails from all over the world. Most of the emails that I get are from countries in Asia. I get a lot of emails from people in China,” Deinhammer said. “I have a little girl in the Ukraine that keeps emailing me about the course, and there was also a school in Venezuela that talked about some of the things that they have done with the course, which was really cool.”

Currently, Health Without Borders is ranked 19 on the iTunes chart and Deinhammer’s anatomy and physiology class page is 23.

“I cannot really explain why my courses got so popular, but I do know that it is really a lot of fun,” Deinhammer said.