Tweens with the iPad classroom — Cool but not really helpful?

Abstract

The iPad as a learning tool has made its way into many elementary school classrooms worldwide. It holds a promise to be a game changer in elementary school education supporting more constructivist learning practices. This paper offers an insight into what happened when in two elementary school classrooms the students were enabled to generate both content and context for their own learning. One of the cases describes the 6 th grade elementary school children's involvement in a participatory design process aiming to design an application for the iPad. The application was to support learning about media production by enabling students to publish a weekly newsletter describing their school week in words, pictures and video. The second case is about how the 5 th grade children influenced their teacher and obtained permission to use one of the iPads creativity apps over a two-week period in order to learn about writing. Both of these projects were part of two larger pilot studies following the introduction of the iPad into the elementary school classroom information ecology. The children participating in the studies evaluated the projects as truly successful. The children's criteria of success were how fun and enjoyable it was to use the iPad. The teachers did not find the projects to be successful. The main criterion they used was the learning outcome. Both teachers found the learning outcome to be inferior to what they usually obtain using traditional teaching methods. Both teachers preferred to use the iPad as a plug-on to traditional ways of teaching. Although our study is small, the results point towards issues that may be important for better understanding of the factors related to acceptance of the iPad as a learning tool.Index Terms-iPad, classroom ecology, cool technology, design with children.

Tablet use in schools: a critical review of the evidence for learning outcomes

“…Negative or neutral impact on reading comprehension occurred following use of tablets three times a week, for 45–60 min a time, over a period of several weeks (Sheppard, ). Teachers also found learning outcomes to be inferior where tablets were used to support collaborative tasks that aimed to enhance student creativity and writing skills, compared with non‐technology‐based tasks that were completed during previous academic years (Culén & Gasparini, ).…”

“…Studies that report neutral findings do not dismiss the use of tablets in the classroom but rather encourage educators, school leaders and school officials to further investigate the potential of such devices (e.g., Carr, ). Issues concerning tablets distracting students (Sheppard, ) and negatively impacting on the quality of work produced (Culén & Gasparini, ), however, are areas that warrant further investigation, as mentioned in the succeeding text.…”

“…The model and operating system of the tablet selected must be taken into account as certain models may be better suited for schools who wish to exert full control over content and exploit open‐source options (Sheppard, ). A related issue includes new tablet models being released midway through implementation (Culén & Gasparini, ) and an occasional need to purchase supplementary technology such as VGA display adapters (Culén & Gasparini, ). Other issues identified include the difficulty younger children can experience in handling tablets, although external cases can help to remedy this (Furió et al, ).…”

“…For practitioners, supports such as dictation software leave less to interpretation and can also enable more accurate assessment (Miller et al, ). However, other studies report distraction as tablets can add additional layers of complexity (due to technical problems with tablet and applications used) compared with traditional means of completing similar tasks (Culén & Gasparini, ). The addition of entertaining features to increase the interest of a lesson may ultimately distract learners and lead to poorer learning outcomes (Iserbyt et al, ).…”

Entering Aladdin's cave: Developing an app for children with Down syndrome

“…Engagement proved a mixed blessing. The literature has revealed how children are attracted to explore outside the task with an iPad (Sheppard, ) and diverted from the expected range of responses (Culén & Gasparini, ). Children in this study explored the other attractions of the iPad.…”