Sheila Fisher, a teacher at Cheatham Hill Elementary in west Cobb, elicited snickers and eye rolls from her fifth-grade students when she asked if they knew where the home button was on their iPads.
“I’ve used the home button a bunch of times,” said Myrna Ramahi, a 10-year-old who was clearly offended.
Fifth-graders at Cheatham Hill have used iPads to design games and glossy videos complete with flashing lights and background music to show what they’ve learned. They created them without their teachers’ help.
The confluence of high speed broadband, easy-to-use devices like smartphones and an abundance of applications is giving children new ways to improve their critical thinking and collaboration skills. This has teachers hoping they can soon answer a question that’s stumped educators for decades: How do you effectively integrate technology into the classroom?
Using skills they’ve grown up with and trial and error, students come up with ways to present information that’s digestible. That independent learning process is crucial, educators say.
“A teacher is no longer limited to say, ‘Here’s what I can provide to you and this is how you need to show your learning,” said Tricia Kennedy, the executive director of eCLASS transformation in Gwinnett County. “You now have all of these options. It’s possible now to provide more choices to the student to direct their own learning.”
The level of work the kids have produced at Cheatham Hill so far has given teachers a jolt.
“They’re teaching me what all you can do with these things,” Fisher said.
Last year, Fulton, Gwinnett and Cobb began piloting a Bring Your Own Device program at several dozen schools. The program allows students to use their smartphones, laptops and iPads in class.
Giving students iPads to take home is an experiment done in small pockets across the metro area. It’s expensive — the initiative that provided them at Cheatham Hill cost $14,000 and Cobb has no plans to expand it districtwide. And setting up wireless Internet safe for children to use is a complex process districts haven’t perfected. Devices have to be periodically replaced, updated and maintained.
While not every child has access to an iPad, what’s happening at Cheatham Hill gives insight into an approach that eventually could become more widespread: Let students take charge of the way they use the technology.
For years, educators have spent millions of dollars buying fancy gadgets, software and lightning-fast computers to impress parents and their children.
But often those devices were used in ways that only replicated traditional forms of teaching and learning: read an opinion article on an iPad instead of in a textbook and then write an essay in a Word document instead of a composition book, for example.
While students were wowed by the new devices, test scores barely budged, several studies showed.
“Technology can be used in ways that don’t really change teaching and learning substantially or it can be used in a transformative way,” said Craig A. Cunningham, an associate professor in the Technology in Education Program at National Louis University in Chicago. “Is there a way of changing the learning activity so that it’s deeper learning using various forms of media? That’s a very difficult question to answer” for educators.
Cheatham Hill principal Belinda Walters-Brazile said in the two years the school has had the program, test scores haven’t risen yet but she sees students more engaged and fewer instances of bad behavior.
“This lets kids have ownership in the classroom,” she said. “They’re not bored. It’s their world.”
This summer, Megan Huss recorded several lectures on podcasts. When class began, she assigned students to listen to the podcasts at home and then, using their iPads, come to class with ways of presenting the information to their peers.
That’s where she has seen the creativity take off.
One of her students created a video of Theodore Roosevelt giving a speech on the Panama Canal. Another used a video application to recreate the Brown vs. Board of Education trial.
When asked how they do it, the students shrugged it off.
“I just went into the app and played around with it a little bit,” said Taylor Carter, a 10-year-old, after showing off a game he created to practice his arithmetic. “We’re working with stuff we’re used to using.”
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