Anatomy Dissection Videos on Your iPod and iPhone

I'm going to preemptively put myself on the spot and go ahead and say that I think I did pretty good in today's Anatomy Practical, covering head & neck.

Note that we didn't get the score back yet and also note that from Mini 1, anatomy was the single class I did well in, but walking out of the anatomy lab, this was probably the first time I felt like well on a practical. We should be getting the scores back either tomorrow or Friday. They're usually pretty good about getting practical scores back quickly.

(This is going to be a long winded post for something really simple, so bear with me.)

I writing now because I wanted to share one of the things I've been doing differently this semester for anatomy that I think helped a lot:

So if you remember the list of supplies I brought with me back to the island over this last, recent break, my iPod was one of those supplies. I've never owned an iPod. It's just one of those pieces of technology that I never bothered with for some reason. But out on the island with a somewhat weird schedule and lots of time to walk around I thought it would be useful.

I'm now subscribed to about 30 podcasts, mostly about TV shows, sports, and video games. I love things like director and producer commentaries for shows, I'm a huge baseball fan, and I grew up on video games. (I haven't really played a video game for more than an hour or two at a time in the past 5-6 years, but I still keep up with the scene for some reason. It's endlessly entertaining for me.)

Anyway;

At Ross, all students get access to a huge amounts of electronic resources on day 1. These resources include Power Points for all lectures, practice questions, and anything else any particular professor decides to upload to the server. The good professors put more information than you know what to do with. For anatomy lab, one of the resources we all have access to are dissection videos for all labs.

"I have an idea" said the struggling medical student, "why don't you put all those videos on your iPod and make use of all time time you're walking back-and-forth to campus, while you're on the bus, and when you're on the toilet.

(Yes, I said on the toilet.)

It's amazing how much time you waste... on the toilet.

The problem was that most of the videos were in a format that wasn't supported by Apple's iPod (mpeg-4.video files in 960x540 resolution). After a little searching I found something simple, easy, and free to downgrade all the videos into something usable:

Videora iPod Converter

There may be better ones out there. This was literally the first one I could find. It took me about an hour to convert all the anatomy files, but it worked. And then there are always other hand-me-down videos that other students pass around. Those got converted and put on my iPod too. I just wish Apple made iPod Nanos with more than 16MB of storage. Between the podcasts and anatomy videos I only have about 4-5MB of space left.

In short, if I could go back and start from day 1 of semester 1, I would:

1. Buy an iPod
   
2. Convert all the Dissection Videos to be more iPod friendly.
   
3. Upload them all ASAP.

Like I said, it's so simple, sometimes I wonder why it takes me so long to think straight. But I do think it helped me a lot this time around. I guess we'll find out how much if helped (if any at all) when the scores are finally released.