iPads in the Classroom and Media Mentors

Is it just me, or has there been a shift lately in the way people talk about technology and young children? In addition to the still-lingering questions of “whether” screen technologies have any role in children’s learning, parents and teachers seem to be hungry for more on the “how” — How should iPads be used? How could apps fit with what I want to show or have children explore? How can I find out what works and what doesn’t?

In commentary for Slate last month, I described some of what I learned about these questions during a visit to the Zurich International School, a private school just outside Zurich, Switzerland.

ZIS, as the school is called, has distributed 600 iPads—one to every student in first through eighth grades, plus a set for teachers in preschool and kindergarten to use with children in small groups. And I had only one thought when I arrived: This is a school with money. In my first few minutes of walking through its colorful, light-filled hallways and well-stocked libraries, I figured I would be leaving Switzerland rich in chocolate but poor in insights that could have any bearing on public education in the United States.

I was wrong. Not about the money—ZIS has resources public-school teachers could scarcely dream of—but about the lessons I might bring home to generate smarter conversations about using tablets in the classroom.

The school has an unconventional take on the iPad’s purpose. The devices are not really valued as portable screens or mobile gaming devices. Teachers I talked to seemed uninterested, almost dismissive, of animations and gamelike apps. Instead, the tablets were intended to be used as video cameras, audio recorders, and multimedia notebooks of individual students’ creations. The teachers cared most about how the devices could capture moments that told stories about their students’ experiences in school. Instead of focusing on what was coming out of the iPad, they were focused on what was going into it. [Read more…]

These questions have also been an undercurrent in several presentations I’ve had the opportunity to give lately, at the EdInnovation Summit at Arizona State, at the annual meeting of the NYC Association for the Education of Young Children, and at the Office of Head Start’s Leadership Institute earlier this week.  My slides from the Leadership Institute are now online here. They provide a hint of a new “media mentor” concept that I am exploring, in which early education policies start recognizing the need to equip parents, teachers, librarians and other early learning professionals with the knowledge and skills to help young children navigate, filter and learn from the teeming media around them.