Teachers Recommend Expanding Ramsey's iPad Initiative

Ramsey schools’ iPad Initiative is working, and it needs to be expanded. That’s the recommendation of a committee of 40 borough teachers who district Director of Curriculum Rich Wiener said spent the 2012-13 school year studying the impact iPads had on learning in the district.

According to Wiener, the K-12 Mobile Technology Committee recommended to the Ramsey Board of Education that it approve expanding the program to the incoming 8th grade class during the 2013-14 school year. Last school year, a pilot program ran with the 8th graders, who will be taking their iPads with them to the high school this fall.

The Committee also recommended the district start moving toward expanding the initiative so that by the 2014-15 school year, all Ramsey students in grades 7 through 12 are learning on individual iPads.

“After that, we’ll see how far we want to go,” Wiener said. Lower grades will likely at least have class sets that teachers can share for special projects.

The recommendations, Wiener said, were based on a year of studying the 8th grade’s iPad usage, attending professional development workshops, making site visits to other districts that use iPads, and consulting with experts on mobile technology in the classroom.

The teacher committee found that the iPads increased student engagement, organization, technology skills, and opportunity to have an individualized learning experience.

Apps like Notebook, where students can keep all of their handouts virtually and organize them by folder, and iBook Author, where teachers can create their own textbooks for free and share them with other teachers and students, are helping improve the learning experience, he said.

“The apps are just great,” Wiener said. In a survey of Ramsey 8th graders, about 90% said they felt more organized using the iPad than traditional methods, he said.

Apps have also allowed teachers to create a “flipped classroom,” where instead of lecturing in class, teachers record lessons and assign kids to watch the videos for homework. Students and teachers then discuss the material the next day.

“There is a great sense of ownership there,” Wiener said. “The kids are given the steering wheel. If they feel like they have an active role [in learning], they tend to take more interest in the content.”

The flipped classroom also allows for more time in class to “go deeper,” into discussion topics, he said.

The Committee also presented findings that students benefitted from immediate access to the Internet during class, and from the ability to include global interactions via the iPads into their lessons.

Moving forward, Wiener said the Committee suggested professional development for all of the district’s teachers on how to most effectively teach using mobile technology.

“We want to keep this at a slow pace,” Wiener said. “We don’t want the iPads to be glorified notebooks. We need to study them and make sure that we use them to help make children in Ramsey more competitive in college and in the changing workforce.”

The Committee also recommended app training for teachers, and consulting with, and eventually hiring, an “integration coach,” or an expert in the field who could work one-on-one with teachers.

Though technology department officials did not respond to calls for comment on the hardware implications of incorporating more iPads into the district in the coming years, Wiener said the set going out to the new 8th graders in September has already been purchased as part of the approved 2012-13 budget. In the future, he said, the district would likely look to a leasing program with Apple whereby it could lease iPads for students.

“We have to have a valid educational response to the changing demands of the world,” Wiener said. He called the iPad Initiative, “an investment,” in Ramsey students.

“I am confident this is going to give children in Ramsey a substantial advantage.”

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