In 2010, school district 197 procured a magnet grant for three of our district schools--Heritage Middle School, Moreland Elementary, and Pilot Knob Elementary. Our oldest daughter entered Heritage that same year as a fifth grader. The following year, she was issued a personal ipad as part of the technology initiative of that grant.
We now have three children who bike home from Heritage with light backpacks, in which a single ipad contains all their textbooks, assignments, videos from their teachers, calendars, and a universe of educational support on the internet. This fall our oldest will move on to Henry Sibley, and she will return to textbooks and ink pens.
You may have had the experience of purchasing a piece of new technology, such as an iphone or a laptop, with a skeptical sense that it is a luxury; it will be fun, but not necessary. But once you have used the new tool for six months, you wouldn’t know how to do your job without it. So it has been for us and the Heritage ipads.
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Our kids scroll through the problems in their homework, writing on the tablets with their fingertips. A finger sweep brings them to a support module for any questions they have. Often they will email me a link to a tough math problem at work, and I do my best to explain it. We have seen how the tool has changed the teachers’ approach to their craft as well. Some of the teachers engage in ‘flipped’ learning, by videotaping the instructional portion of their class to be viewed at home; class time is then used in completing the homework assignments together. Others have ‘written’ their own digital textbooks, incorporating material from hundreds of top sources to provide their students with a rich perspective.
Our district was able to modernize in this necessary way with the benefit of a large one-time federal grant; but not all students have access to the technology, and there was no plan to sustain the technology that was purchased. Thankfully, our new superintendent has detailed a plan to bring technology to every school in our district. It’s simply not realistic to imagine that our district can operate on bound textbooks and paper notebooks ten years or twenty years from today. They have become the slate and crayon of our time. A systemic approach to modernizing our schools with technology is a vital and urgent priority.