“We are expanding our iPad technology fairly significantly at the high school at the present time,” principal Marcia Lawrence said. “Of course, we’re continuing to expand our PC technology also, but the biggest push we’ve had this year — and what I foresee perhaps in the spring — is more expansion of iPad technology.”
Lawrence said the district has allocated nearly 100 iPads to be used by students at the school. The tablets allow the students to use different applications — programs downloaded from Apple’s app store — to supplement teachers’ lessons.
“We like the fact that the teacher can choose an app that helps them to approach the learning objective that they have, and that every child can have the same application open and working on it at one time,” Lawrence said. “That relieves us of some of the difficulties that we have with wireless technology, when it’s they’re using PCs and they have to access things through web browsers.”
Lawrence said the variety of educational applications available makes the iPads an invaluable tool in the classroom.
“There are a million applications for iPads. It’s just been an exploding kind of thing,” she said. “If you wanted to see an app on the French Revolution, you can find one tailor-made for that one historical event that would talk about the culture and the causes. It might involve a game, it might involve some kind of matching game, or it might involve some research.”
The high school has two classroom sets of iPads, which teachers can reserve through the media center for different class periods. The classroom sets are housed in iPad Learning Labs, essentially mobile carts with slots inside to fit 30 iPads. The learning lab charges the iPads and also allows selected apps to be simultaneously downloaded to all the iPads at once.
The school has made additional iPads available, which Lawrence said are normally used for small-group learning situations.
While large numbers of schools have begun phasing out textbooks in hopes of shifting solely to digital formats, Lawrence sees the two as learning tools, both still applicable to a classroom setting.
“At this point, we’re not planning on phasing out textbooks,” she said. “I wouldn’t say that computers are taking place of textbooks for us, but I would say they are a major supplement to textbooks.”
And the application of new technology has predictably seen its fair share of glitches, along with what sometimes becomes an overdependence on the technology.
“The biggest negative in technology is that it has glitches,” Lawrence said. “Sometimes, I think in the last decade, our teachers have worked so hard to become technologically literate, that sometimes the technology becomes the lesson, instead of the technology being the tool to teach the lesson. So we want to be very cautious about that.”
“We want teachers to use technology to enhance those objectives,” she added.