By: Aida Lashinsky, Reporter
Students from kindergarten to college are making use of the simplicity and interaction that ipads offer for education. Here at Seminole High School teachers are beginning to enter the touch-screen age as well.
Dr. Becht is a physics teacher at SHS who has been using ipads along with his lessons.
“I got a grant from the county on a proposal. Since we have a lot of technology that we use in physics classes the county decided that it’s time that we have a class set so that we could try them with our students and using different apps because there’s lots of apps in physics as well as working them with our other technology lab,” he said. “What the ipad does is it gives them instructions to how to set up the equipment and you’ll see the ipad sitting on the table and they’ll be looking at them doing this and trying to make sure they put it together right. And then they do the experiment and didn’t quite get the answer they expected they can go back and check to make sure they did everything right. Besides, they have a handout they can use too but this is another visual. And some of them I do in three dimension. So they can put on glasses and see it in 3-D.”
Junior Nicole Fullagar is in Dr. Becht’s physics class.
“It’s kind of faster to type than write so you could get a lot more done in class. Plus it would be easier to do student presentations so I guess you’d get involved more. Plus you could do the simulations and stuff.”
Dr. Becht has found the ipads very useful in his classes. To keep track of the class set, all of the ipads are numbered according to seats and students so that if one goes missing it can easily be tracked down. It takes only about five minutes at the beginning of class to get the ipads handed out and five minutes at the end to put them all back.
Students in his class learn how to do labs through ipad demonstrations and are able to make their own presentations from their desk and send them to the overhead. He doesn’t have a class set of textbooks, he has E-books and PDF scans of the books so that students can download them onto their computers.
Sophomore Tamyya Woodard is excited about teachers bringing ipads into their classrooms.
“I think it’s a great idea,” she said. “Because it’s like, you know how they ask us to take out our phones? Instead of phones, ipads are bigger and better to share.”
While many students are excited about being able to use the tablets in their classrooms, some would prefer to stick with paper and textbooks.
“It’s hard for teachers to figure out exactly what you’re doing. I mean, with computers teachers kind of can peek at what you’re doing and see, oh that is so wrong. Not what you’re supposed to be looking at,” said junior Andre Samaroo. “You can’t see what’s on it. You can do personal stuff on it, but not exactly appropriate personal stuff.”
To prevent off task distractions in a room full of hand-held computers, teachers walk around the classroom. If a student in Dr. Becht’s class is caught doing something that they shouldn’t be, their ipad use will be suspended for the rest of the year and they will not get it back. The website system installed on the ipads is filtered and the same method of teachers being able to see and control student desktops from a distance also is available for the ipads.
Schools all over the country are joining the technology age and dropping the textbooks for tablets as more and more people are beginning to see many benefits. Personal ipads can easily solve the problem of having to lug around heavy backpacks and books as well as remaining relevant compared to aging textbooks. Some schools such as Burlington High School in Boston payed to supply every student with an ipad, stopped buying new textbooks, and closed down the computer lab.
Last year Apple took in $436 million from the sales of educational ipads. As those numbers rise, many more teachers are beginning to consider making the switch.