Apple Study Trip: Day 2 ~ ICT For Educators - 5 views
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When students were given their own iPad, they were given full autonomy of their device and had to set it up from scratch. They set up all of their own accounts and installed their own apps, from a combination of required apps to those which they chose themselves. Each student was given a $40 iTunes gift card to use for their purchases. Experience showed that true success relied on moving away from the school being the "boss" of the machine to one where it was student driven and student managed.
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It was found that the Ipads are very different from laptops in that students can really relate to them and, when used, they do not become the focus of the learning. Instead they become one device which can be used with all learning tools that students have access to. The iPad became the "red pen" where much of the work got done in other ways and the iPad was used when needed. Laptop computers control thinking and control the desk. When used, they become the focus of the learning. iPads are a technology which has really changed the way students work with computers in the classroom. The real challenge for staff is to embrace this and to understand that you can't expect to have iPads in the classroom and teach the same way that you did when you didn't have them. It changes the way students work and they way teachers teach.
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Like your comment about how the iPads don't become the focus of the learning. That's a thought that's been on my mind recently - the importance of the perception of "seamlessness" in tech usage. That's probably one of the most important reasons a technology gets adapted - no matter how cumbersome it seems at first (e.g. learning how to drive a car) - because the normal usage of the technology doesn't hinder the intended task at hand. (That's why once you learn to ride a bike, you don't think so much about the bicycle itself as you think about moving faster.) Think Donald Norman in "The Design of Everyday Things" has a term for this: affordability. So I guess, my thought on the usage of the iPad (and any new tech at hand): The learning of the new tech need not be intuitive. But the everyday usage has to seamlessly flow with the given task at hand - so that the tool and the user become "one" with the task. (Just like how a user fumbles with a pair of chopsticks at first, but once he masters it, his chopsticks "become" part of his fingers.) Then such seamless technologies get seamlessly adopted as "cognitive-multipliers".
