Elim Christian College Principal, Murray Burton, says that after such positive experiences with iPads the Junior Campus is now moving more students to Apple. "The interesting thing is, we're a Decile 8 community but I don't think we're a rich community. People have to pay attendance dues to come here, we have five buses coming predominantly from South Auckland, Maori and Pacifika kids has gone up, and yet Shaun's door was beaten down. As soon as we said 'you need an iPad to be in a blended classroom', there were no questions. We just needed to work out how they could do it. Everyone just couldn't wait to get in on it."
The school held a parent's evening to go over the pros and cons. The new educational possibilities with an iPad, versus an actual paper notepad, and the apps on the iPad were explained, along with the advantages of everyone using the same device. For example, if some students only have paper and others iPads, the students with iPads are limited in that they have to also use their devices simply as paper pads - the whole class is held back.
It was decided it would be best if parents bought the iPads, and the school also recommended families made them family-, rather than student-, possessions that the students would use at school, and the family at home. Murray says the degree of ownership has helped the devices be cared for, and spares the time taken to take out school-owned devices, distribute them and then collect them again at the end. An iPad is a personal, portable device: "The idea of iPads locked up in a case is just wrong, somehow."
Shaun says that with iPads, everyone's getting content reinforcement, content consumption and content creation, and then there's curation and communication, plus gaming and entertainment. But "When you say to a parent 'we want you to bring iPads', their first thing they think about is that it's just a gaming and entertainment tool. When you start to unpack the many ways iPads can be used including concept reinforcement, content creation and content consumption, which we really focussed on in the early days, and now we talk more about the communication and curation side of it ... these are the types of ways we made progress.
"When you use a device for what it's designed for, rather than the way we've been teaching, it creates a whole new world of opportunities for students."
Students at Elim Christian College on their iPads.
iPads suit multiple learning experiences rather than just one, teacher-enforced experience.
Meanwhile the Ministry of Education doesn't even have a deal to provided iPads to teachers. Yet teachers are key - examples have shown that just landing devices on students almost never works, so the college first arranged to supply discounted iPads to teachers, and the return to the school was that the teachers were then required to do professional reading and blog on them, to 'get them into the cyber-world'. Shaun: "We knew if the teachers understood it, they would get the students into it." Regular sessions were set up where teachers would show others various things they'd come up with - the camera for a learning assignment; planning tools they'd discovered etcetera. In this way, the teachers were both learning and teaching each other - and device literacy grew exponentially.
The students buy apps. The school produces a 'stationary list' of apps that goes out at the start of the year and when new topics are coming up. Some cost money, but the majority are free, and fit into the areas described above. "Google Drive is really big - we use that a lot - and things like ComicLife."
As for outcomes, homework has been an obvious change in student behaviour, compared to five years ago. They do a lot more homework now, generally, as it's so much more fun and engaging. The iPads have also smoothed out former differences in work presentation. With pen and paper, average work may have been graded highly if it was beautifully presented. Now presentation is no longer such an issue: iPads can make everything look better, and favours all the different approaches to submitting work. For example, a formerly messy black-paper-and-pen student turned in a work about volcanoes using stop-motion animation with clay and Lego, as that process was so much more engaging for them.
Shaun: "We found that homework was now taking a huge amount of time, which led to anxious queries from parents about how much homework was being set - but actually, it was the same amount as always!" Nothing had changed - except the iPads. In classes, students generally are much more engaged and happy to present their work.
Last year, when there were blended classes (one-to-one iPad classes) and the non-blended classes, Shaun took all the National Standards data and ranked it on a scale, and found that end-of-year average scores had accelerated 9 per cent in maths and writing and 7 per cent acceleration in reading ... in the iPad classes. They've also noticed absolutely no impact on the kinds of socialisations the students exhibit - another common fear about widespread device use amongst kids.
The improvement in results was despite some new teachers entering the blended classrooms with no prior experience and some wifi networking issues the school had been suffering. Infrastructure-wise, every class has a projector and Apple TVs are widely used as a presentation conduit, and to serve and display school notices and information. Some of the classes are what used to be two, now sharing one space, sharing several teachers and helpers to service groups of students at different learning speeds simultaneously.
Murray believes this is the first classroom technology over the last few decades that is truly transformative. He and the school sees the future as bright and exciting, with more iPads. Murray: "I know there's catch-up from the Android world, but iPad just seems so delightfully intuitive and hand-in-glove."
