Friday, October 14, 2016

Problem Solved

Give a kid an iPad, and he'll be able to catch his own dinner.

That's pretty much the theory behind our district's one to one initiative. For the last three years every 2nd and 6th grader has received an ipad, and every 9th grader has been issued a Macbook Air. As teachers? Our instructions have pretty much been, Use the devices to enhance instruction, but be sure to give the students some latitude to innovate.

I get that philosophy. I may be an immigrant to this brave new digital world, but I like to think I have assimilated quite well. And although it's tempting to focus on the inappropriate of the innovations (accessing non-school material during class, airdropping all manner of things to other people within Bluetooth range, and finding several ingenious ways around our school restrictions, to name a very few), let me tell you: those kids impress me with their creative uses of their devices all the time.

Why just today, a group of students was doing a skit for reading. "Do you have a speaker?" one of them asked me.

"You can hook up to that one," I told her, but one of the other girls in the group waved me off. "Never mind," she said, "we can use our iPads."

And what they did next was kind of amazing. Their sketch took place in the woods, so all three students pulled up audio of birds and then placed their devices in different places in the room. The skit was pretty good, but the surround sound was stunning.

No comments:

Post a Comment