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At Skyline High School, at least a dozen uses are planned for the 100 iPod Touches that were awarded via the technology grant. The uses will undoubtedly lead to hundreds of future projects, said Pete Pasque, instructional technologist at the school. They are “productivity tools to help manage what students are learning,” he said. “It’s so exciting to have students as creators. That’s what we’re trying to do at Skyline.” Pasque said he hopes to see the iPod Touches used for everything from recording band practices in order to review music to accelerometers in science class. There’s even talk of putting an iPod in a football helmet, running a play and charting and graphing the impact in Microsoft Excel. “Teachers come to me and say ‘hey Pete, I want to do this’ … and I say ‘OK let me figure it out,’” Pasque said. “It’s going to make it more real world for the kids.” Uzelac said she had so many requests for iPod Touch grants from Skyline, that she asked for a combined proposal. Skyline had a dozen teachers ask for 500 as a school; Skyline was given 100 in the grant process.

Paper usage has decreased with some “some teachers going paperless” and many the use of ebooks instead of dead tree books was highlighted in a particular class.

The problem with too many iPad deployments (like the one highlighted in Zeeland) is that schools end up doing the same thing they were before the new technology rolled out, except now they’re using “21st Century Technologies” to do them

he examples cited in the USA Today article (using iPads for flash card Apps or highlighting passages in a text with touch) hardly point to the pedagogical shift that tools like the iPad can enable