20th Century flops?

I have just recorded an interview for my local TV station Westcountry Television. The interview was requested because there has been public outcry about one school in Cornwall called Mounts Bay Academy (very close to where I live here in Devon) that has recently purchased an iPad for each of its 900 students. Here is the story as reported by BBC News. The moaning is from the Tax Payers Alliance, who consider the iPad a 'gimmick' and a waste of taxpayers money. It's to be expected of course. Whenever a school here in the UK announces an innovative scheme such as the iPad project that involves spending money, pressure groups such as the Taxpayers Alliance come out of the woodwork to complain vociferously. But their complaints are ill-informed and certainly not grounded in research.

The headteacher of Mounts Bay, when interviewed, said that she believes that touch screen technologies are the future of learning. She is right. But the future doesn't hang around for long. Schools that do not begin to innovate and adopt new technologies for learning will be left behind in the 20th century. It won't be long, I predicted in my TV interview, before we begin to see non-touch technology in our schools. It's coming, and it's only a matter of time. Our children will sit on our laps and ask 'did you really have to touch a computer to make it work?' That is the future, but for now we have the touch screen iPad and its mimics. Children find touch screen tablets intuitive and easy to use, because they are minimally designed, and there is little to distract them from the real business of education - learning. It is no longer enough for teachers to expect students to passively receive knowledge. Now students need to create their own content, organise and share it, and that is exactly what tools such as the iPad do. Schools such as Honeywood School in Essex (1200 students) and Longfield Academy in Kent (1400 students) and several others around the UK are already forging ahead .... and receiving flak for their farsighted visions. One Australian school in Melbourne - Trinity College - has already done an evaluation study on the 1-1 provision of iPads to their student population. Their Step Forward project findings reveal that iPads can be gamechangers, and can motivate and engage students significantly better than other tools. They have even reduced their paper consumption drastically as a result of the touch screen tools. In the short term, pedagogically, and in the long term, financially, investing in touch screens makes absolute sense. Have a look at this ultimate guide to using the iPad in the classroom, and you will see what I mean. It's a live online document that is constantly being added to by teachers as they find new ways to use touch screen tablets to transform teaching and learning.

It's no good for organisations such as the Tax Payers Alliance to complain about wasting public money on 'gimmicks' and then suggesting that the old tools will suffice. That won't wash at all. Don't they want the best for our young people? Do they want our teaching profession to be stuck in the past as 20th Century flops? Do they want us to prepare our children for the future or for the past?

Image by Ernst Vikne



20th Century flops by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.