Ahhhh!! Technology is Here...

With the iPad rollout in full effect, I have seen more technology in classrooms than I have ever seen. Gone are the days where teachers had to check out a large box TV and roll it around campus to and from classrooms, growing student anticipation for a movie day in class. Students use their iPads for everything now that they have it. I've seen students use it to access the textbook for class, write essays and projects for class, check their grades on the NEO app, complete in-class assignments, and of course get off task and play with education approved applications. All students and teachers also receive a Google account, which gives them access to Google Drive and all of its applications, including Google Classroom, which is used to substitute paper.

Each classroom at Goleta Valley Junior High is equipped with a nice, flat screen television with Apple TV and a document camera. All the teachers (throughout the district) are supplied with MacBook Airs and iPads. With all their Apple Products in sync, teachers can airplay anything on their computers and iPads up to the class. Now, with the one-to-one, teacher iPads are also equipped with Apple Classroom to watch over their students' iPad usage in real time. Apple Classroom enables teachers to lock student iPads over bluetooth/wifi as well as view the entire class' screen and send all/or singular iPads to specific apps and webpages.

As of now, all eighth grade students at GV use their iPads to gain access to their textbook. Eighth grade math is currently piloting the College Preparatory Math curriculum so they do not have enough textbooks for each student to take one home. Other than the mandatory usage for eighth graders, I've really only seen students using their iPad to write class assignments on Google Docs.

Many teachers definitely utilize their Apple TV, using it for powerpoint presentations. I've definitely used it as well to show my classroom warm-up, making it easier for students at the back of the classroom to read it as opposed to its usual place on the whiteboard at the front of the classroom. In talking to a few teachers about the rollout, many teachers are slowly integrating it into the classroom, but the movement is very slow, even stagnant for some. However, most of the technology use is a substitute for what schools have been doing prior to the rollout. Google Classroom is just another venue for students to do their work and turn it in, instead of writing it on paper and turning it in to the teacher. There are definitely upsides to this: students cannot use the "the dog ate my homework" excuse, claim they lost it, or my personal favorite of the year "oh no, I left my homework at Taco Bell." With the eBooks, students are using for eighth grade math, it is 100% a substitute for the textbook, and while I have students look at their eBooks to do classwork in class as does my CT, there is one math teacher at GV that refuses to allow the usage of iPads in his classes. Students in his class use the textbook in class and then use the eBook at home to do homework.

Some of the teachers' favorite feature of the iPads is their ability to lock students out of their iPad when they are off task. In English classes, I've seen teachers give their students a few minutes at the end of class when they are done with their task to play with whatever they want. It definitely keeps them quiet during this time because they are engaged in their own task, but what is it doing from an education perspective?

The most common use for the iPads in class is to have students begin typing their essays or lab reports on Google Docs so they don't have to first write it on paper and then go back and type it like we did in the good old days. Its nice that Google Docs also allows for work offline and then later uploads it back into the cloud for students who do not always have wifi access. However, ultimately I don't really see technology being used as a tool for learning very much in the classrooms. As of right now the iPads just seem like a very expensive substitute for paper and pencil, especially since teachers haven't really been introduced to educational tech tools. The most common teacher comment I've heard is that all the students have iPads and we have no control over what they're doing really on them. They're no longer required to engage with one another in human-to-human contact, many teachers noting that before school and during lunch they see many students just sitting on their iPads, perpetuating the "outcast" label.