Two Week iPad Trial: Part 2 (the planning process)
Apr 11, 2011 in Education, Geek, Tech
Warning in advance: This is the kind of boring, technical post. If you’re looking for apps and activities, come back in another post.
Back in November or so, my awesome district IT guys dropped off a couple of iPads for my school. Gifts from the district.
It was pretty awesome.
I know that in some buildings, it seemed like those devices went to administrators or other tech people. Fortunately, I’d already had the chance to borrow one for a few months earlier in the year, so I knew that I could certainly survive without one for the time being.
So my librarian and I got them into the system and started checking them out to teachers. I loaded them up with a bunch of mostly free apps and a couple of paid ones with a little bit of leftover gift card money from our PTO.
When I handed one over, I took about two minutes to show them the basics: turning it on, flipping through pages of apps, and using the home button. The base directive, implied if not explicitly stated, was to explore, discover, and think about how to use it in the classroom. The more common way I probably stated that was, “Play with it, and tell me what you think.”
They told me, and it was pretty much all positive. I encouraged them to not just play with it themselves, but to have the kids try it out, too. One of the teachers in my school has fourth graders, so she twisted their arms to play with it. Their feedback was encouraging and valuable.
The inevitable conclusion of teachers using these and bringing them into their classrooms was clear: we needed to try out a class set. Fortunately, I knew somebody who had one.
The Media Specialist at the Middle School in my district, Dennis Villano, is not only a great guy with a wealth of knowledge, he also bought 20 iPads or so with some of his budget. After asking, he was kind enough to let me pick a couple of weeks to borrow them.
I chose the end of March for a couple of reasons. First of all, it was immediately following the end of the marking period, so teachers wouldn’t be freaking out about grades. Secondly, while some classes would be dealing with standardized tests, I knew I could work around it, and that it might disrupt the normal schedule in beneficial ways.
Once I had the date, I needed a plan for how to get these out into the classrooms.
Some math: 22 classrooms divided by 9* days = just under 2 and a half classrooms per day. In my mind, while spreading the wealth equally, this system would do a disservice to actually trying to put the iPads through their paces. Every class would be more or less the same: “Hey kids, here are some iPads! Here’s how to use them! Let’s check out some apps quickly! Gotta go, kthxbai!”
In my mind, that would have been a waste of two weeks. So I came up with an alternate plan. For six of the days, I would spend a full day in one classroom, one at each grade level K-5. For the remaining three days, I’d try to get around to as many classrooms as possible. A few weeks before they arrived, I threw it out to everybody in an e-mail, asking for people who’d like to try them out for the day.
In every grade, I had one teacher step up almost immediately for the full day. Once those were full, I had a harder time immediately filling the remaining three days, although they did end up all booked in the end. In every grade, I got to at least two out of the three or four classes. In the end I was fortunate enough to not have to turn anybody away who requested to have them for at least a little while.
In my next and post in the series, I’ll do a breakdown of the activities we tried and the apps we used.
*As a warning, it takes a really long time to set up a bunch of iPads when you want them all to look and feel the same from positioning of apps. I created a base template iPad from oe of my own and backed it up. I then had to restore each iPad from that backup. When loading ~4Gb of apps, this takes about 25 minutes per iPad. It made for a really long first day with the iPads, and not having them get into the classroom. Luckily, I planned for this from the start.









