iPad Collaborative Research

It doesn't appear as if the school district is receiving much of an educational discount for its ambitious idea. According to Morrill, the cost of outfitting the approximately 285 kindergarten students expected to enroll this coming fall is around $200,000, or $500 per iPad, per student.

A secondary school in Singapore, where the youngest students are aged 12, has spent S$135,000 ($100,000) to buy 150 iPads for 140 students and 10 teachers as part of this project.

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.

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.

Epic Citadel Challenge

Student work