nccs

=Newton-Conover City Schools has a pilot iPad program. They're blogging about it here.=

Anne says: I'm interested in considering the idea of giving our iPads only to certain teachers who will CONSISTENTLY and CONSTANTLY use them. I don't just say this because I am likely to be a teacher who would keep the iPads in students' hands, but I really believe that distributing them throughout the school runs the risk of our program failing. There will be MUCH more potential for breakage and problems. There will be much down-time. We need to be sure that kids are touching the iPads all the time.

If we were to give 8 iPads to 3 classrooms rather than run a cart from room to room to room, we can show the best practices in action, potentially getting attention and funding for even more technology.

Not every teacher in our school is interested in iPad tech. Not every teacher in our school is capable of caring for them. Despite our constant instruction and advice, the netbooks are ill-used by some folks in our school. Students have added toolbars, moved applications and broken mechanical parts, to name a few issues.

There will be jealousy issues no matter how we implement this program, but the main point is to get the iPads in the hands of students and to have those students working with high quality applications and lessons.

Whoever gets the iPads needs to PREPARE themselves and their kids for the deployment. If we simply give a short instruction to the teachers, this project will fail. Students need to be taught about caring for the iPads before the devices come to the classrooms. Students cannot be taught these important lessons if the teachers do not understand the serious nature of this deploy.

I am NOT saying that students need many lessons in learning to swipe, pinch, etc. These are natural motions that will come easily to everyone. I really did simply hand my iPad to my kids and tell them to figure it out. BUT I first talked about what each of the buttons was for and how delicate the device is. We have VERY specific rules for using the iPad and any infraction results in a student's inability to touch the iPad for a week or more depending on the severity of the broken rule.

NC says: "Our iPad pilot teachers are using the iPads continuously as a teaching, learning, and assessment tool. I love how easy it has been to share a student's work by simply hooking his/her iPad up to the projector."

The teachers who are part of the pilot SHOULD each have a projector in their room. This is another critical need for the success of our program.

Note that the NC program is in 3 classrooms - one 5th grade, one 6th grade and one high school classroom. They did NOT deploy throughout the district. CCS's deploy is risky at best and we need to show the district that using a different approach to this windfall is the BEST use of the technology.