iPad Collaborative Research

Mobile devices will not improve our children's learning on their own. We need to foster the teaching profession, to learn (at a reasonable pace) how to use and adapt these devices to best support children's learning.

We need to change the way classrooms look and rethink how students are organized and what the role of a teacher actually is when a mobile device connects you to a world of unimaginable knowledge and information.

What needs improvement: time getting the Ipads distributed and back ear buds/headphones (Right now we are sharing the ones that were supplied, but for sanitary reasons, I have gotten admin. permission to send home a request for students to provide their own)

The iPad also allows teachers to experiment with technology with ease. During the summer of 2010, we selected 25 faculty to be iPad Innovators. The teachers received an iPad for the summer and a challenge to redesign their curriculum with whatever apps they wanted. For less than $200, our faculty developed innovative and creative learning activities for their classes using the tablet. Occam's razor suggests that this type of success would not have been possible or immediate with a substantive investment in subject-specific software.

By providing our faculty with the tools and the opportunity to experiment, we have been able to develop and implement learning activities that allow students to achieve the level of "create" at the peak of Bloom's Taxonomy. And scaling new heights is really what revolutions are all about.