IPads and the classroom

I hate ICT when used without purpose.

Some of my favourite misuses of technology:

• Social Networking
• Research assignments
• Interactives
• Online learning modules
• Portals
• Blogs & Wikis

If someone comes to you and says we should be doing this, immediately ask why.  I wouldn't give a teacher a sledgehammer hoping that they will find something to do with it.  That's what is happening all too often with ICT.  You can do great things with these tools, but they need to be appropriate for the task.

Rather, start with a problem that inhibits learning.  If ICT is the optimum solution for solving the problem - then use it.

I have a problem in one of our streams.  Student work rate is low in the top class and self image is at risk in the focus class.  There is no personal excitement in learning new concepts and little drive observed.  The gap between the top and bottom class is quite large and there are issues with core numeracy skills in both groups.

I had 30 IPads at my disposal, so i designed a solution to bring both classes together (50 kids) and bring some excitement back to the group.  I could have done it without the iPads but it saved me some work and was a motivational factor for the kids.  I was lucky to have four teachers available to help on the day so student ratios (even though there were a lot of kids) were low.

Problem: Low motivation and low student output.

Solution: Use the iPads as motivation for completing a large amount of work to illustrate what can be done by students.  Schedule high and low performing students together.

Method: Six worksheets on core numeracy (tables and basic number facts) were placed at the side of the room.  All students were given the first sheet (25 questions).  The next sheet was given on completion of the previous sheet.  Students were given an iPad on completion of the last sheet.  Students in the focus stream only had to complete 4 sheets in the timeframe.  A math game (KingofMaths) was placed on the iPads($30 total cost) and high scores were recorded on the board (with the top stream students given a 10000 point handicap).

Outcome: Crazy, off the chart fun.  Completely controlled chaos.  Each student completed over 100 questions in the hour with little difficulty.  The few disengaged students were identified for further work, other students were taking the incomplete sheets home to do them later.  There was a sense of fun in the room and students were able to see what they could do when they tried.  

It hasn't solved the problem (that takes time) but has given students a new way of looking at what they can do.  Next week I have some puzzles to do to challenge their thinking, not just their computation speed, using a similar model.  Given that the whole thing too about 30 minutes of preparation and was a first attempt,  I think we can improve with more efforts.  I would not do this every lesson, but once a week I can see how we can attack the type of topics used in NAPLAN and improve our results further.   Teachers in the room responded that they thought it was awesome and something completely different to what we normally do.  Hopefully it will stimulate ideas for driving teaching pedagogy further.