As the school-year comes to a close, we’ve had an opportunity to reflect on the success of our new iPad program which was introduced in Fall 2012. After an extremely positive trial program in the previous year, we had high hopes that iPads could help transform how technology is integrated into our classrooms. We expected successful implementation to take much of the year and were pleasantly surprised to see just how quickly teachers and students embraced the new student-centered platform.
Walk-through data shows that students are using iPads nearly 1/4 of the time
We did not conduct any controlled experiments to compare student achievement with and without iPads. Although this data may be useful, subject-specific benefits are already well established – especially in literacy. What we were most excited about though was not improvements in scores, but the opportunities to develop the students’ transdisciplinary skills (nunc ut IB’s Approaches to Learning)
Measuring these skills has always been a challenge, and our data is anecdotal, but the results of a recent teacher-survey suggests that iPads have already had a positive impact in these areas.
When asked to compare skill development using iPads vs technology they had previously used, teachers indicated that the iPads were an improvement. In each skill area 60%-90% of the teachers saw an improvement with iPads. For example, teachers overwhelmingly felt that iPads had aided the development of research skills:
Because of our focus this year on non-subject-specific workflows and skill development we expected the teachers to report difficulties using iPads to deliver subject-specific content. Surprisingly, many teachers felt that they had been able to use iPads more effectively to deliver content.
*Large amount of N/A because of many respondents do not teach math
We suspect that this success is influenced heavily by the increased number of devices across year-levels and the ease in which new apps could be downloaded and installed without help from the IT department:
We were confident that the iPad’s multimedia capabilities would quickly be realized, and they were. Until this year, multimedia publishing to YouTube was limited to a few teachers, but this year every homeroom had their own YouTube channel and most classes published 100’s of videos.
Elementary homerooms alone published more than 7,000 videos this year!
The elementary teachers have, as a whole, been enthusiastic risk-takers, and some of their early successes are very inspiring:
- It’s become second-nature for students to now ask each other for shared resources and to do this independently
- The iPads enable students with different strengths to find a variety of ways to share and publish their understandings and ideas and to be creative in doing so
- Students are able to easily post work samples to their blogs without it taking too much time
- Students were really connected and were excited to be ‘having fun’ learning
- The ability to give kids instant feedback on a large screen
- Students not needing to ask teachers to fix problems/issues all of the time
- Collaboration has shot through the roof, as students frequently email photos of recorded learning, documents, websites, videos and successes they have created from scratch to each other
- Being able to reflect on their skills by watching themselves perform
There are certainly challenges to be addressed as well. Some themes:
- Keeping track of how students are using the iPads
- Training and time to find apps that are good and completely in line with the learning target
- With the amount of multimedia assessment/ learning engagements produced on iPads there must be a better way to share this work. e.g. digital portfolios
- The process to redeem apps is not so easy for world language and specialist teachers
- NIST core 10 apps that we could work to become more trained in them
One of the greatest challenges is trying to find a balance between researching, installing and lightly using 100’s of apps and simply focusing on a few core apps to from which to build transferable workflows. Naturally, many teachers have researched and tried countless apps. Many have commented that the amount of effort required isn’t sustainable. We agree, and hope that the next year will be an opportunity to consolidate our practices around core apps which all teachers and students know deeply. In other words, we want to keep things as simple as possible.
In one short year, NIST’s iPad program has been overwhelming success for teachers and students.
The complete results of the teacher survey are available here.