First Semester as a 1:1 iPad School

After the first full semester of having an iPad 1:1 program, I began to reflect on our program and implementation process. Overall, I think we have had a very successful roll out and semester. We have had a major decrease in the use of paper, printing, and copying costs. We also have had only a five percent incident rate of broken or stolen iPads, which is great for a school. The integration of e-textbooks and digital assignments has been excellent. But we have had some issues too.

Several teachers are having classroom instructional issues using the iPad or having the students use the iPad appropriately. When we started the process of moving to the 1:1 iPad program over a year ago, we stated how we teach, how we transfer information, and how we use technology was going to change.

Classroom management and instructional issues have more to do with student engagement and motivation then the iPad. Please understand that we are not blaming teachers for this issue! These have been concerns that a number of schools and district struggle with throughout the world. The real questions at hand are:
 

1. How do we use the iPad to increase student engagement and motivation?
• Have we been successful in creating a strong culture of digital citizenship?
• Have we been successful in creating dynamic lessons that effectively implement the iPad to create or just consume material?
• Have we made our lessons personal for each student that we teach?
• Are we utilizing social media, games, and other media to our advantage or have we allowed it to be a disadvantage?

We all have heard the term “21st Century skills” but no one has really defined or elaborated as to what it really means or what it looks like in a classroom. 21st Century skills and why we are an iPad 1:1 school are the same. To develop students who can work collaboratively, creatively, with innovation through project or challenge based learning activities to learn new knowledge, master that knowledge to better serve our community and the world that we live. How do you make that happen? By having students use the concepts that we teach them (in small manageable chucks) to research and complete real world projects that are interesting to the student; by creating a learning environment that fosters collaboration, creativity and innovation for the students. 

With this in mind, we also realize that we need to develop additional training opportunities for all the teachers, parents and students. Asking teachers to step out of the comfort zone and to teach in a new manner described above is not easy. The job on any administration is to help each teacher get better with integrating technology into the curriculum and to make them better teachers.