Apple and IBM may not be fully satisfied with how technology is used in education, but there are success stories: Mineola, a New York suburb district school, has already developed a teaching method in which students spend about 75% of their instructional day on iPads. That’s much more than other schools who have turned to technology to embrace digital learning.
The article, published by The Hechinger Report (via AppleInsider), goes into specific details: It describes a day spent in school with third-graders taught by Morgan Mercaldi, and says the students are “constantly” using their iPads for various activities.
While the school kept the traditional model of one teacher per 20 or so children, it equipped all third and fourth graders – 417 children – with their own tablet. When the day starts, they take it out of their backpacks and put it back only when the day ends. That’s because the teachers found that “putting away serves no purpose.”
Using an iPad, however, doesn’t mean that paper, pencil, and books are things of the past: The students still use them, but they have deployed apps such as Edmodo, which allows the students to communicate with the teacher in a specific scenario.
Earlier reports had already revealed that Apple is enhancing its iPad in Education program, with the aim of making remote device management easier for IT professionals.
