For those of you that have been following along with my iPad journey, I wanted to reach out and share my thoughts on our first year with an iPad lab. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you might want to start here.
Brief Overview of our goals: I work at a K-12 private school. We purchased 21 iPads (5th Gen) to suit the needs of our 1st - 4th grade classes. The way that our school does electives, I went to each class one day a week for 40 minutes. When the iPad cart wasn't in use (3rd-7th period each day), teachers were able to "rent it out" from me for full use in their classroom. I had two teachers that did this weekly from day 1, and a few others took advantage of it throughout the year.
Recommendations:
1. Buy big iPads. We set up Apple Classroom on each of the iPads and because each student had their own log in, it stores each profile as it's own app owner and in turn saved each app 8 times (one for each class). We quickly realized that this was consuming so much storage so we spent a lot of time adding and deleting apps in an attempt to save the most room possible. I would sometimes forget what we deleted and want to go back and use it later in the year and wouldn't be able to.
2. Plan ahead. Again, it isn't super easy to add apps to each iPad. I didn't really know what to expect with an iPad mobile lab so I didn't do a ton of planning ahead of time. I wish that I would've done more research on apps that I wanted to use, because it would've made sense to teach some of them in a different order.
3. If you don't use Google Classroom (or the like), invest in teaching your kids to use Seesaw. What I love about Seesaw is that your students can turn in any work that they do on the iPads into you. I love that they can share their work with one another and even comment and give constructive feedback to one another. At the beginning of the year, I wasn't using Seesaw and was having a hard time collecting the work that the students were doing. If they know that they aren't turning it in, then they don't give it their best effort. Adding Seesaw and collecting everything they did (done or not) was one of the best decisions that I made this year.
4. Be PATIENT. This is a learning curve. You are going into another teacher's classroom to work in their environment. Whether you like it or not, their classroom management styles overflow into your technology time. Also, there are days when all the apps will crash, when the internet won't work, or when half the students won't listen to your directions. Just breathe. Take it one day at a time.
5. Allow for some "fun time" or "free days" for those classes that need that extra push. One thing that I loved to do with my classes was allow them 2-3 minutes of 'fun time' on their devices if they had good behavior all class. This wasn't complete free reign of the iPad, but it was allowing them to choose an app that we have worked on before to play on. I typically didn't let them on the internet because it is just far too much to manage. If they were talking when I was or off topic or not paying attention, I would take their free minutes away one minute at a time. This was an effective classroom management strategy for me. With my lower grades who don't move to apps as quickly and wouldn't benefit from 2-3 minutes of fun time, I instituted 'free days'. This would be once (maybe) a quarter when they got to pick any app to play on during class time. I would take time away from this day, and I even ended it early a few times due to behavior. These were just simple ideas that worked for me to get kids to stay on task and follow directions.
Have you tried an iPad lab in your classroom? If you have, let me know!
- Hilary
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