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Have iPads and tablets revolutionized education?
YES
No
I am a music teacher in Waterville Junior and Senior High schools where I use iPads regularly to improve my work and student instruction. Last school year, our junior high made the switch from laptops to iPads. Students have used their iPads for many projects, some of which were Garageband for composition, Airdrop for instant file sharing, and as a digital recorder. Garageband is Apple’s music software program. It is full of activities like piano and guitar, electronic drum kits, and prerecorded “loops” that students pull together to create unique pieces of music. There is so much variety within the program that students can access jazz, classical, and many other genres to apply in different projects within their general music class. When students are ready we can wirelessly share by connecting their iPads to the Apple TV that is attached to the projector. This makes peer assessment as well as teacher assessment extremely fast and easy. In our music classrooms, students can peer-review by accessing an electronic document I create and share with them. There are many ways to share a document between teachers and students. When I create a document I can choose to share that document with students by using the Airdrop feature on our iPads. Students receive rubrics, templates, instructions and more and can use regular wordprocessing software to complete their work and then send it back to me. In Waterville, we have also used Ebackpack as a way to share files. In addition to documents, Ebackpack has a great feature allowing students to share digital recordings. Sometimes I have up to 60 students in one class and it seems unrealistic to ask students to record themselves performing. Solo performing can bring a lot of anxiety and can be time consuming to listen to individually during class time. However, if I am going to assess someone fully within my classroom I have to know what their performance level is. iPads have made it so amazingly easy for students to record themselves by holding their iPads up to their mouths or instruments during regular rehearsal. After students record themselves, they can share the file with me privately and I can give meaningful feedback to them on an individual basis. iPads are now an indispensable way for me to teach music. I keep finding more and more ways to incorporate them in meaningful ways. I can’t wait to see what else is coming! Ciara Hargrove, Waterville EA Maine Educator • September 2014 10
Tablets and iPads have not changed my teaching or revolutionized my work. The revolution already happened. The real revolution occurred when I decided to develop asynchronous courses to meet student needs. I am a professor of mathematics and business, and I easily adapted my upper level business courses to online, asynchronous delivery and was surprised to see how that affected my traditional face-to-face courses. The maturity of the learners and the similar academic backgrounds facilitated the process, and masked many of the inherent problems that were avoided. However, I quickly realized that the taped modules and prepared materials and exercises were suitable as supplemental instruction tools for my traditional courses, and they involved the use of multiple technologies and diverse tools. When I developed an upper level, asynchronous, online statistics course to support our professional programs, I was forced to face many problems that were not apparent in my business courses. I found that I needed to rely on technology to develop the calculation skills. This had to be studentfocused and not time sensitive because students came with widely diverse mathematical and technological backgrounds and capabilities. I used computer assisted learning to individually develop calculation skills, and I focused my time and group exercises on problem identification, and framing a situation so that it could be analyzed quantitatively in a valid and useful way that resulted in a suitable solution to a problem. This process involved using Blackboard, laptop computer and smart phone on my part. Students had to use Blackboard, but the technology they used was their choice as long as it was compatible with what was required. For those reasons, I stated that the revolution has already happened. If you are not using tablets or iPads, then you have to be using some other technology that has similar properties. I prefer my laptop to a tablet. I use Excel for statistical problems because of ubiquity, and I avoid specialized statistical programs. When I am teaching a future nurse about statistics, I am expecting him/her to be able to identify a problem and to know what tools can validly analyze and solve that problem. I am more concerned with the student recognizing what type of data is involved, what tools are suitable, how to use those tools, and how to interpret the results obtained from those tools. In retrospect, what is revolutionary is the focus on student learning outcomes rather than Roger Roy, Associated Faculties of the on delivery of content. And that is independent University of Maine (AFUM) of technology.
