As students settle into third quarter, the freshmen who didn’t receive iPads at the beginning of the year are now also claiming ownership of the coveted technology. This new style of teaching offered by Apple is filled with technological advances to help students, offering interactive learning and educational apps for students to make it both more beneficial to their education, and fun to participate in. Apple has substantially altered the world of education with its new, advanced program.
With all this new technology at the fingertips of our new freshmen class, complaints arose throughout the different grades over the fairness of freshmen getting such advantageous technology to further their studies. Upperclassmen have argued that they would put this technology to better use because their classes are more difficult than freshmen classes and would thus be more helpful to them and effective in improving learning.
However, talking to Ms. Larson, teacher of English 9G and 9ALP, can dispel some of these arguments through her explanations of the reasons behind the freshmen being chosen to test out the iPads. She says freshmen were given the iPad “because of common English, Science, and Math courses,” unlike upperclassmen who have a variety of classes they can take for their core subjects. Thoughts that the freshmen, the youngest in our school, should not be considered capable of this new responsibility was proven to be inaccurate by Ms. Larson, who has been teaching with the iPads since the beginning of the school year. She explained that though there are some students who “struggle with self-discipline” when handling the technology, the majority of the students “are doing a fantastic job of taking care of their iPads and using it as a valuable resource.” Teachers are also working hard to make the best use out of this new educational resource. Teachers have faced “a larger learning curve than the students” because they must find ways to incorporate this brand new technology into their normal lesson plans. However, they are equipping themselves with the new benefits that the infinite resources of the iPad make available to them to improve their classes. Whereas teachers used to be limited by problems such as how much outside material they could bring in based on the time and resources it took to obtain that material, they are now able to use the iPad’s immediate and countless resources to “enhance and accelerate learning to strengthen the 21st century skills necessary for future student success.”
When talking with Ms. Larson, she will tell you that she and her students all struggled to adjust to the iPads at first, as their peers who just received them are now doing. But she will also tell you that the learning process to efficiently use the technology is swift, and the iPad has been extremely successful as a valuable resource to further students’ learning. Although research is still being conducted as to whether this new program will continue into next year, Ms. Larson says she is excited to see “where next year might and hopefully take us with this new tool.”