When you hand an iPad to a student, it’s not the just the screen that lights up!
Why is the iPad the technology of choice for the classroom over others?
This is a question that almost answers itself. It is new, innovative, and exciting technology. This is how adults and children alike see the device. Looking beyond its shiny exterior and features, we learn that the iPad has so much more to offer. Educationally, we discover the innovative technological path the iPad has begun to take itself and its users down.
The iPad is a device that offers immediate and continuous access to educational content. With one swift and subtle tap of the screen, students access online media that supports understanding of text, taking away the need for cumbersome keystrokes, a mouse or physical textbooks.
One of the best benefits of having students using iPads in the classroom, is that it is commonly viewed as something new, exciting, and sociably acceptable. Therefore, students with an iPad may be working on something different but it is not evident visually, allowing students to be accepted rather than alienated by their peers. This avoids many stereotypes and social stigma that accompany the technology commonly used by students with special needs in the classroom. The use of an iPad could possibly have a positive effect on students’ education, social life, and self esteem.
iPads offer the luxury of being customized to each individual’s needs through app selection. The process of customization is not a tedious task, rather it may take as little as a few minutes. The vast availability of apps, as well as the many features of each app, make it very easy to differentiate assignments for students.
Integrating the use of digital technologies, specifically the iPad, into literacy instruction equips students with new literacy skills. These new skills are needed for reading, writing and communicating in our fast growing digital world. This should be a priority for teachers.
According to Hutchison (16), the iPad offers two useful opportunities to students in the area of literacy:
- Digital, interactive books
- Support individual readers’ text comprehension and potentially engage struggling readers
Focusing on literacy, the iPad offers features allows students to be independent while being interactive and engaging. The tools within the iPad help students to creatively demonstrate and express their learning and comprehension. Students are able to physically interact with and manipulate texts to meet their needs and interests. It supports students in moving easily between texts and illustrations, while having options for aid all in one device, without always relying on a teacher’s intervention.
Observations by Jim Harmon (Harmon, 31) illustrate the use of the iPad in the classroom:
- Students completed journal entries more quickly than writing with paper and pen
- Both quality and quantity of writing improved
- More students who struggled to complete entries using pen and paper were now finishing them
- The teacher no longer crated home boxes of journals. All turned in work was able to be checked on a smartphone or iPad
- Teacher was able to provide more timely feedback, therefore helping students make corrections or adjustments to their work sooner
The use of an iPad as a tool in the classroom “complements and extends traditional literacy learning and supports students engagement” (Barone and Wright, 293). Todd Wright asks the question that every teacher should reflect, “What makes today’s kids really sit up and fires their neural fibers?” His answer? “Technology…Schools need to connect education to their students’ lives with technology” (Barone and Wright, 298). He sums up the reasoning of why the iPad should be an option and a choice of assistive technology for students. It is something that they are interested in, they are not only willing to use it but begging to ‘have a turn’, and it has so many benefits while offering a large variety of apps that allows a teacher to customize the device to each students’ needs and interests. The iPad will keep students today captivated and pleading to learn.
A question to reflect on: Would you find yourself excited or dreading waking up and going to school if your teacher had an iPad waiting for you to use?
iPad Implementation Benefits to Special Needs Students (an interview with an AT consultant)
http://vimeo.com/62437857