5 ms·

My high school spent thousands of dollars on 30-40 iPads which we "used" primarily in Spanish class in my senior year. Overall an enormous waste of money and ti

My high school spent thousands of dollars on 30-40 iPads which we "used" primarily in Spanish class in my senior year. Overall an enormous waste of money and time not limited to problems connecting to the spotty Wi-Fi. Our teacher was not aware of any good apps that she could tie into lessons so the iPads were used primarily as a web browser for a crappy textbook website. Virtually nothing was accomplished for a semester with the iPads. The IT director at my school was right when he referred to the devices that were supposed to be a revolution in education as "toys".

tjl 12y ago
It sounds like your IT director didn't support the teachers use of the iPads well (or the WiFi for that matter). Reading Fraser Speirs' blog (http://www.speirs.org http://www.speirs.org) about how he did a 1:1 program for his school (he was the computer teacher and IT professional there), it's clear that you can't just hand the iPads out and that's it.
manicdee 12y ago
The IT director's prophecy is self-fulfilling. If you don't put some effort and funding into application selection, you're going to have teachers using the iPads and ChromeBooks to teach kids lessons from free & crappy web sites that have no idea how to present lessons in a clear, concise manner with correct spelling and grammar. If the person responsible for a particular technology isn't going to spend time supporting colleagues using that technology, they're basically abandoning the technology. There are a multitude of language training resources on the App Store alone. I'm sure that someone in the US education system has done a review of various course material available through the App Store and Apple University (plus all the online courses) and determined which ones are best in particular brackets of student age, course price, etc. That a teacher was resorting to crappy web sites rather than the best available resources indicates that there were problems outside the technology environment: I'm thinking either management support or financial.
smackfu 12y ago
If someone gives you a tool and no support on how to use it, do you blame the tool or the person who gave it to you?

tjl 12y ago

It sounds like your IT director didn't support the teachers use of the iPads well (or the WiFi for that matter). Reading Fraser Speirs' blog (http://www.speirs.org http://www.speirs.org) about how he did a 1:1 program for his school (he was the computer teacher and IT professional there), it's clear that you can't just hand the iPads out and that's it.

manicdee 12y ago

The IT director's prophecy is self-fulfilling. If you don't put some effort and funding into application selection, you're going to have teachers using the iPads and ChromeBooks to teach kids lessons from free & crappy web sites that have no idea how to present lessons in a clear, concise manner with correct spelling and grammar. If the person responsible for a particular technology isn't going to spend time supporting colleagues using that technology, they're basically abandoning the technology. There are a multitude of language training resources on the App Store alone. I'm sure that someone in the US education system has done a review of various course material available through the App Store and Apple University (plus all the online courses) and determined which ones are best in particular brackets of student age, course price, etc. That a teacher was resorting to crappy web sites rather than the best available resources indicates that there were problems outside the technology environment: I'm thinking either management support or financial.

smackfu 12y ago

If someone gives you a tool and no support on how to use it, do you blame the tool or the person who gave it to you?