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Subtext is a free iPad app that allows classroom groups to exchange ideas in the pages of digital texts. You can also layer in enrichment materials, assignments and quizzes—opening up almost limitless opportunities to engage students and foster analysis and writing skills

Teaching in a 1:1 iPad classroom allows me to use technology to redefine teaching and learning. Subtext has been a wonderful addition to the 'toolbox'

The number-one technology request of today's students is to have email and instant messaging always available and part of school.

Many teachers, under pressure from all sides, are often so afraid to experiment and to trust their kids with technology that they demand extensive training before they will try anything new. All these factors impede even the many schools trying to change.

I have a group that watches the videos the night before and then uses class time (extremely effectively, I might add) to work through challenge problems, labs, quizzes, and projects. In the same class, I have two students that work 30-35 hours each week outside of school. They use the class time to watch the videos together and then move forward. They rarely do chemistry at home, which is fine with me. Yet a third group does most of their chemistry at home, checks with me in class, and then moves on to geometry for the rest of the period. Each group is totally different than the others, but they are still learning.

The problem, I began to realize, was my own understanding of how the iPads should be utilized in the classroom. I had seen them as a supplement to my pre-existing curriculum, trying to fit them into the structure of what I’d always do

ne. This was the wrong approach: To truly change how my classroom worked, I needed a technology-based redefinition of my practice.

Here are five lessons I’ve learned about redefining classroom instruction with technology—whether iPads or other tools.

While kids may initially love technology-inspired lessons in schools simply because they are different from the paper-driven work that tends to define traditional classrooms, the novelty of new tools wears off a lot quicker than digital cheerleaders like to admit.

What students are really motivated by are opportunities to be social — to interact around challenging concepts in powerful conversations with their peers.

Technology’s role in today’s classroom, then, isn’t to motivate. It’s to give students opportunities to efficiently and effectively participate in motivating activities built around the individuals and ideas that matter to them.

The school’s success suggests that perhaps certain instructional fundamentals—fundamentals that schools have devalued or forgotten—need to be rediscovered, updated, and reintroduced. And if that can be done correctly, traditional instruction delivered by the teachers already in classrooms may turn out to be the most powerful lever we have for improving school performance after all.

Digital media supplies information, but it also shapes the process of thought. 

My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

Literary figures are openly admitting that they cannot engage in sustained critical reading, in a sense, they can no longer read for a purpose