Nora MacAnally cradled her new iPad gingerly, but it wasn’t long before her mother, Melinda, reminded her to put the cover she’d purchased on it right away and “never take it off.”
The 15-year-old high school sophomore slipped her newly bought tablet computer into its cover, a wraparound leather sleeve colored in a chic, deep fuchsia.
The front panel bore the stamp of Cathedral High School.
MacAnally is one of more than 900 underclassmen that Cathedral required to purchase iPads next school year and one of hundreds more students in Indianapolis that will be stuffing tablet computers in their backpacks this fall.
However, that’s about where the similarities end: Metro-area schools often have different educational priorities and how the schools choose to use the computers is far from uniform.
The move for Cathedral to require its students to purchase iPads is the culmination of four years of upgrading the school’s wirelessnetworks and classroom technology.
The school put iPads in teachers’ hands a year ago for a transition to an iPad-focused curriculum. Cathedral hopes to go book-free by 2016 and has enlisted more than 40 students to form a special transition group, the iSquad, to help students and teachers get accustomed to the tablets.
“Students are now part of the learning process for teachers,” said Rolly Landeros, Cathedral’s chief information officer. “Instead of teachers being afraid to ask for help, we now have students helping teachers be successful in the classroom.”
The iPads will play a lead role in the school’s cross-curricular program on the mores of the Internet, which also touches on topics such as copyright law and cyberbullying.
Some schools are starting students on iPads even earlier.
An online promotional video for the Park Tudor School features iPad-toting kindergartners using the tablets to draw and photograph butterflies and edit videos about what they learned about them. Jane Hizer, head of the school’s media and technology, said moving from Macbook Pros to the cheaper and more intuitive iPads “gets the school more bang for its buck.”
With the extra money last year, Park Tudor was able to buy an iPad for every two kindergartners and will expand the program this fall up through the fifth grade, with older grades receiving tablets as they refresh their own technology in the coming years.
“The kindergartners were a pilot starter group, and had we not tried it out with them — and had it not worked so well — we probably wouldn’t have thought to use them throughout the rest of the school,” Hizer said.
Indianapolis Public Schools started adopting iPads when they first appeared in April 2010, said Dexter Suggs, the chief information officer of Indianapolis Public Schools. Teacher training with the tablets started weeks after the first iPads rolled off the assembly line, and tablets were in students’ hands the next fall.
From high schoolers at Shortridge Magnet to second- and third-graders at Sidener Academy, schools have given their students iPads for the year and let them take them home.
More than 2,500 iPads are now in use in the city’s schools thanks to technology grants, Suggs said.
“(The second- and third-graders) may be more creative with the iPad than the high school kids,” he said. “They don’t know anything else. They have no fear whatsoever of technology.”
Source: Indy Star Written By:
