iPads Start Invasion Of Worcester Classrooms
Think about the 12-year-old who gets her own iPad and uses it to complete the majority of her school work. She’ll take notes on it, study on it and even take tests and quizzes on it. There’s no need for paper, no ink-stained hands, no lugging around 12 pounds of school books.
Now think about how learning in a paperless world where information is literally at your fingertips at any time in any place will change how that 12-year-old experiences the world.
It’s a heady thought. But it’s happening right now in Worcester.
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Bancroft School, on Shore Drive in Worcester, recently announced plans to put iPads in the hands of its students in an effort to enhance learning in the classroom.
Starting in the fall, the private school will recommend that students in grades six through 12 have their own personal iPads and that they bring the devices to school. Starting in the 2012 school year, that recommendation will become a requirement.
The school is bearing the cost of the IT infrastructure — including an upgraded T1 line — but parents will be required to purchase the iPads, unless a student is receiving financial aid that covers at least 80 percent of the school’s $25,900 annual tuition cost for grades six through 12.
Despite the need for parents to cough up additional funds for the devices, the response thus far has been “generally positive,” according to Scott Reisinger, headmaster of the school. The main questions from parents have been about timing — Why now? for example — and about the iPad’s edge over more traditional laptops.
“This isn’t something that we decided on in the last three weeks,” Reisinger said. The school approached the idea by putting together a pilot program this year that was funded in part by two grants — one from the parent-faculty organization and the other from Westborough-based eClinicalWorks. Four children of the eClinicalWorks executive team attend the school. The results of the pilot program were so compelling that the proposal to extend the program was approved by the school’s education committee as well as its board.
Falling In Love With Technology
Reisinger is a historian and he’ll tell you that he’s not much of a tech guy. But then you’ll learn that he bought his first laptop in 1987 — way before the devices were mainstream. It was a Toshiba T1000 and it cost him $1,200. Interestingly, the base model of the iPad 2 now costs less than half that amount — $499 — and it’s lighter, faster and you don’t have to lug around floppy disks.
So it’s not entirely surprising that Reisinger would be a champion of this new technology in the classroom. And it turns out he was sold on the iPad in a relatively brief amount of time.
He first tried out the iPad last summer to design a lesson plan on reconstruction and the Civil War.
“Within a couple hours time, I realized that I could throw away all of my textbooks,” he said, adding that the iPad will allow teachers to “create lessons that are more creative and interactive than ever before.”
Bancroft School is on the forefront of iPad adoption, but it’s not alone. Several other Massachusetts schools — both public and private — have similar plans.
The question on my mind when I spoke to Reisinger was what replacing textbooks with iPads will mean for the future of education, and specifically the future of paper. After all, as a newspaper journalist, I have an interest in whether the tweens of today will be reading on dead trees by the time they are in their 20s and 30s.
Reisinger isn’t ready to predict that all paper and traditional books will disappear from classrooms. He says that he’ll know better in two years’ time.
But I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that iPads in the classroom will change everything about the way we as a society consume information. I used to be one of those people who said that print would never die. Now, I’m not so sure. If you’re born with a tablet computer in your hands, I can’t see why you would ever feel the need to fold a paper copy of the New York Times under your arm.
No matter what my personal feelings are about the meaning of iPads in the classroom, Reisinger, for one, is optimistic, particularly from a financial standpoint.
“Technology has been a black hole into which money has gone,” he said. “I’m seeing the light on the horizon and how it’s going to change how we’re doing things.”
Got news for our Digital Diva column?
E-mail Christina H. Davis at cdavis@wbjournal.com.
Watch Scott Reisinger demonstrate how an iPad can be used in the classroom:
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