A School's iPad Initiative Brings Optimism And Skepticism
by ERIC WESTERVELT
October 25, 2013 5:05 PM
Students at Coachella Valley Unified School District use iPads during a lesson. The district's superintendent is promoting the tablet initiative as a way to individualize learning.
8 min 14 sec
A growing number of school
districts across America are trying to weave tablet computers, like the iPad,
into the classroom fabric, especially as a tool to help implement the newCommon Core
state standards for math and reading.
One of California's poorest
school districts, the Coachella Valley Unified southeast of Los Angeles, is
currently rolling out iPads to every student, pre-kindergarten through high
school. It's an ambitious effort that administrators and parents hope will
transform how kids learn, boost achievement and narrow the digital divide with
wealthier districts.
But, as with tablet efforts
across the country, this one faces skeptics and obstacles. Some wonder if its
projected benefits are being grossly oversold.
Personalizing Education
Before becoming Coachella
Valley's superintendent of schools, Darryl Adams was a keyboardist and singer
with the '80s pop rock band Xavion. It was a one-hit wonder, complete with '80s
hairdos and a slot on a Hall & Oates tour. He says it was the first
all-black rock band on MTV.
Today, Adams still has a
touch of the showman as he talks about his school district's latest project.
"Everyone will have an
iPad!" he says with a broad smile. "It's gonna be exciting!"
Music was Adams' passion
when he was young; it was what inspired him in school. And he sees the iPad
plan as central to exciting kids in school today. He argues that since the
federal No Child Left Behind initiative 10-plus years ago, school districts
have often failed to inspire kids. Instead, he says, they've been teaching them
how to take tests.
"And that's not what
education is about. So for the first time in our history as a nation, I think
in the world, we're going to be able to individualize and personalize
education," Adams says.
The district has leased the
tablets from Apple at a cost of nearly $9 million. Voters here approved a bond
issue, backed by property taxes, to pay for most of it. Funds from Title I — a
federal program designed to help low-income schools — and from California's
Common Core initiative are also being used for training and implementation.
Some 80 percent of kids in
his district live in poverty, Adams says. He sees the tablet plan as a civil
rights issue, noting that the bond measure passed with nearly 70 percent
support. "Some of our families live in trailer home parks. Some are
migrant farmers," he says. "But they're putting money on the line for
each other, and that's a true indication the community cares about each
other."
'No One Is The Expert
Anymore'
The district has set up
headquarters in a trailer to coordinate the massive distribution of nearly
20,000 iPads and accompanying training, security, curriculum changes, parental
consent forms, and more. Inspirational quotes dot the walls — not from famous
educators, but from Apple's late founder, Steve Jobs.
Matt Hamilton, the
district's educational technology coordinator, says educators and students are
learning from each other. "No one is the expert anymore," he says.
"The whole paradigm has really shifted. Teachers are no longer the
possessors of knowledge. They're more the facilitators of learning."
Students in seventh grade
and up can take their tablets home on evenings, weekends and every school break
except summer. Sixth grade and below will have to leave the devices in a locked
classroom cart.
“The whole paradigm has really shifted. Teachers are no longer
the possessors of knowledge. They're more the facilitators of learning.
-
Matt Hamilton, educational technology coordinator
The district set up a
training program to highlight the best teaching practices and to brainstorm
classroom curricula. Music teacher Michael Richardson, one of 120 pilot
teachers, says he has involved students in figuring out the devices. One
student, for example, found a promising music app and "he taught the class
and taught me. It was kind of great," Richardson says.
Middle school English
teacher Patricia Inghram was also in the pilot program, which tested the
tablets in every grade and every subject matter throughout the district. She
says she's been using them extensively and successfully in her classes for more
than a year. Even though she's a longtime teacher who started out teaching on
chalkboards, she says, "I feel comfortable enough to use it at this point,
and I think they're fantastic tools."
High school geometry teacher
Patrick Beal says the challenge is to make the tablet more than a glorified
notebook. "The goal is to transform what I do in the classroom into
something completely different: to take them outside of class, spark curiosity
and inspire the learning process," he says.
Security Concerns
It's not clear how many
schools or districts across the country are using tablets in the classroom. The
U.S. Department of Education doesn't track the number, and an Apple
spokesman declined to comment or provide numbers on how many schools have
worked with iPad classroom initiatives.
Some districts have publicly
stumbled with their initiatives. Los Angeles Unified students easily got around
restrictions on their district-issued iPads last month: They simply deleted
their personal profile info and then could surf the Web without restriction. LA
quickly put on the brakes on its billion-dollar iPad rollout to boost security
and make other changes. Several other districts across the country have also
delayed their tablet plans because of security concerns.
Coachella Valley is trying
to learn from LA's problems. It's working with Apple to strengthen profile
security and will block harmful and inappropriate online content, as required
under the rules for districts that receive federal tech dollars. For now,
social media sites and YouTube will not be blocked.
Inghram says some security
measures should be a classroom management issue. She has kids take a "tech
oath" on digital citizenship and proper use of the iPad: no cyberbullying,
harmful or inappropriate pictures or content, or social media during class
time.
Some of the projects she's
done in class include using the tablets to produce podcasts and link via Skype
with experts at the Edgar Allan Poe Museum. Her favorite: virtually visiting the
historic Globe Theatre in the U.K. during a lesson on Shakespeare.
Many of the kids never leave
the area, Inghram says. "But being able to talk to someone who is sitting
in the Globe Theatre and show them around the building and answer their
questions about Shakespeare while you're reading his sonnets is an experience
that, you know, it opens their eyes."
Lack Of Connection
But some teachers, parents
and kids worry that there's a kind of iPad boosterism here that borders on
naive. While school district officials are promoting the tablets as central to
improving academic achievement, research on that so far is mixed at best.
At Coachella Valley High
School, one of two high schools in the district, junior Cheyenne Hernandez says
she's open to new media in the classroom but wonders if the iPad money might be
better spent on other things. She says people will most likely steal them,
break them or wear them out.
"And in a student's
opinion, most of the kids are going to go on Facebook, Twitter,
Instagram," she says.
“That's where I see the difficulty. The disconnect is between
giving students an iPad to use and making it relevant to the classroom.
-
Rebecca Flanagan, high school librarian
And it's not clear how the
district will integrate the curriculum with its ambitious tablet plan.
Coachella Valley wants to make the iPads a central part of efforts to meet new
Common Core state standards for math and English, and there are new Common Core
apps coming out regularly.
But the head librarian of
Desert Mirage High School, Rebecca Flanagan, wonders which ones the district
will use, how well it will work and how it will all be integrated into a
coherent plan.
"That's where I see the
difficulty. The disconnect is between giving students an iPad to use and then
making it relevant for the classroom," she says. "I mean, it's a toy
for them."
Perhaps the biggest bug is
connectivity: Large parts of the Coachella Valley are not covered by high-speed
Internet. And even where it is available, many families here simply can't
afford the service.
Tenth-grader Eli Servin is
in a special education class at Coachella Valley High School. His teacher says
he "really blossomed" using the iPad at school to help coordinate a
recycling project. But at home, he has no Internet connection unless he's
connecting to a hot spot on his sister's cellphone or using the Wi-Fi
connection at a local McDonald's.
The district is using
funding from the bond measure to boost Internet capacity and accessibility for
its far-flung schools. But Adams, Coachella's superintendent, acknowledges that
expanding connectivity to homes, especially in the district's many rural and
impoverished pockets, will be much harder.
"I've told my staff: If
we have to park a bus in the neighborhood with a Wi-Fi tower on it or whatever,
we will do that to make sure that our students are connected," he says.
It's one of many issues that
schools across the country will be intensely observing as the former pop rocker
tries to pull off his biggest show yet.
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