ipads presentation slides (ecis leadership conference, seville, april 2014)

The iPad EffectWhat the research is telling us

© Richard Harrold 2014

This is a summary in PDF of the slideshow I presented at the ECIS Leadership Conference in Seville, Spain in April 2014.

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Have iPads in your school

Have other tablets in your school

Have a 1:1 model somewhere in your school

Operate a take-home model

Show of Hands


I began by asking my audience to indicate what degree of iPads implementation was present in the schools they represented.


It was at the ECIS Leadership Conference in Malta in 2010 that Apple’s Vice President, Education, John Couch demonstrated the iPad for the first time in Europe. He told us “We’ve invented this thing. Now it’s up to you to tell us what it is”. He was only half-joking. The iPad’s potential was unknown to educators at that time.

The iPad in Education (2013-14 school year)

94% tablets US Education are iPad

80% Worldwide marketshare in Education

UK Education business doubled last year

iPads are in 47% of schools in the UK

Average install base of 50 units

Largest install base of 2,500 units

Four years on the situation has changed radically. These figures were shared at the Apple 1:1 Summit at ACS Hillingdon in England in November 2013. They point to a significant take up of iPads in classrooms in the US and the UK. Other countries have reported similar growth.


The cost of iPads and the associated needs of training, app purchases, licensing and insurance etc. that accompany any decision to introduce iPads in a school obliges a school leader to address a board or governing body’s request for a rationale with something more coherent and better thought through than “Trust me, I know what I’m doing”...

How important is engagement?

Effective at what?


The heartening news is that some quality data is beginning to emerge that supports some of the claims made for iPads. The connection schools are making between how students acquire skills and knowledge in their recreational activities and how they engage with formal academic learning is generating new approaches to pedagogy that are proving both engaging and effective. Two questions that extend from this observation are How important is engagement? and what exactly are these new pedagogies effective at producing?

Cedars School of Excellence

First School in the World to roll out 1:1 iPads

In exploring these questions it makes sense to look at schools with a longer track record of using iPads in the classroom. One groundbreaking study by Marks et al. (2011), looked at three categories of student engagement in Cedars School of Excellence in Scotland - the first school in the world to introduce 1:1 iPads for all its students.

Essa Academy, Bolton

Technological Phoenix from the Ashes of a Failing School

Another school, Essa Academy in northern England, reported some transformational results following the school’s recasting as an academy with technology at its heart. The iPod Touch, and later the iPad, were the main tools used to effect this transformation under the leadership of headteacher Showk Badat (shown above)

Hurstpierpoint College

1:1 Pioneer School and home of the

“Digital Pencil Case”


At Hurstpierpoint College in southern England iPads are viewed as the “digital pencil case” containing many of the tools students need and use to complete their school work. Vickie Bacon’s leadership of this programme has resulted in some impressive improvements in both student achievement and teacher pedagogy.

Longfield Academy, Dartford

Part of Leigh Academies Trust - a group of linked schools sharing an

academic and vocational vision of the future guided by mobile learning

Leaders at Longfield Academy in Kent, England have steered a large-scale adoption of iPads in the past two years. Currently, Longfield hosts the largest 1:1 iPads initiative in the UK.

ACS Cobham

Action Research on iPadswithin the Framework of the Centre for Inspiring Minds


ACS Cobham International School was another early adopter of iPads, beginning our 1:1 roll-out in January 2011. Unlike most schools covered here, ACS Cobham began issuing iPads to first and second grade students - and then grew the programme along a “trickle up” model. Currently, ACS Cobham has one of the largest 1:1 iPad programmes in Europe.

-‐iPads still too new

-‐Measuring the wrong constructs What are the dependent variables one is most interested in? Student engagement? Marks et al. (2011) Affective domain? Harrold (2012) Academic achievement? Broadribb (in progress) Special areas of interest? Bebell et al. Pepperdine University (2012) Open? Burden et al. (2012), Alberta Ministry of Education (2011)

-‐What problems do iPads solve for us? ISP Case Study Practical management of ICT classes Instant on and battery life Collaboration, responsibility, engagement often a benevolent by-‐product

Problems Facing Researchers


iPads remain relatively new teaching and learning instruments, and the formal research body has not had time to acquire many studies that draw data from mature school-based iPad initiatives. Those few that have been published in peer-reviewed journals have often focused on highly specific areas of the curriculum or have addressed highly specific constructs.

-‐Philosophical context

What is the purpose of ICT lessons? What is the homeroom teachers’ role in such lessons? What is the ICT teacher’s role? What expectations should administrators articulate in terms of co-‐planning, co-‐teaching and co-‐evaluation? Who should be responsible for teaching eSafety?

Problems Facing Researchers


There is also a confounding variable associated with research in school settings in the form of the philosophical context framing ICT teaching. This has recently emerged as a major theoretical discussion in the sociological and philosophical literature on human interaction with technology.

Draper (2013) - Technology leadershipCline (2013) - Technology leadershipPye (2013) - School principals as enablersSincar (2013) - Technology leadershipSublette (2013) - Developing teacher leadershipFoiles Kiel (2013) - Technology as change agent

Types of StudiesTechnological change


The background to the study my two fellow researchers and I have been most recently engaged in is informed by studies in technological change (here are listed merely a few recent studies in this field)...

Murray (2010) - iPod TouchMarks et al. (2011) iPadsAlberta Ministry of Education (2011) - iPadsHuber (2012) - iPadsKearney et al. (2012) - Mobile learningBurden et al. (2012) - iPadsDeMallie (2013) - Smartphones and tabletsJefferies (2014) - iPadsBroadribb et al. (in progress) - iPads

Types of StudiesMobile devices in the classroom


... and by studies of mobile devices in the classroom (of which a small sample is described above). The latter set of studies has emerged as a specialised branch of education technology, but it differs in some important ways from studies of older technologies such as language labs, video, desktop computers and so forth.

Murray (2010) - iPod TouchMarks et al. (2011) iPadsAlberta Ministry of Education (2011) - iPadsHuber (2012) - iPadsKearney et al. (2012) - Mobile learningBurden et al. (2012) - iPadsDeMallie (2013) - Smartphones and tabletsJefferies (2014) - iPadsBroadribb et al. (in progress) - iPads



Highlighted here in orange are five studies I thought worthy of further discussion in my Seville presentation, but all are worth reading. Broadribb et al. is not yet complete. She and her fellow researchers are examining the influence of iPads use on academic achievement - a notoriously elusive and challenging association to prove.

a) iPads had had a positive effect on student learning, allowing a wider range of classroom activities to occur

than had previously been the case.

b) The most conspicuous success could be observed in schools that had introduced ownership models in

which students took the iPads home with them and treated them as personal property, rather than school

resources.

c) A key Einding was that teachers learned to use the devices not through the introduction of formal

professional development workshops but experientially and through collaboration with both peers and

students.


Burden et al. (2012) - iPads

©


The conclusions of Burden et al. are worth reading. Burden’s team (from Hull University) studied the use of iPads in eight primary schools in Scotland. They reached three major conclusions as a result of their study which are summarised above.

Research Design

Qualitative Study

Exploratory Design

Theoretical framework - human interaction with technology - change leadership


My presentation in Seville included three video clips which I have omitted in this pdf representation of the presentation. They showed interviews with school leaders and teachers who shared their impressions of using iPads in the classroom. Their thoughts are not easily summarised here, but our published study will describe aggregated findings informed by their contributions and those of other leaders and teachers in over a dozen schools across Great Britain. This slide describes the research design of the study.

So, what is the research telling us?


After describing both my own research and research conducted jointly with my two fellow researchers, Latifa Hassanali and Vickie Bacon, I presented at Seville some preliminary findings in the form of what over three dozen school leaders who are experienced in using iPads in the classroom have described as successful practice. These are summarised on the next nine slides.

I tried not to make assumptions about my audience’s familiarity with apps such as Nearpod, Edmodo, Socrative and Showbie even though these (and a few others) are fast becoming the “must-have” tools for classroom teachers who use iPads regularly. Here, real students’ names have been blanked out but this is an authentic page from Showbie on which the teacher can communicate with students and through which students can interact with the class and one another - either in a flipped classroom or a traditional setting and in either synchronous or asynchronous timeframes.

Edmodo is designed to resemble a popular social networking platform and which thereby acquires a cool factor and an instant familiarity. It happens also to be a highly effective tool and is rapidly acquiring an admiring following among teachers.

Socrative allows teachers to organise tasks and activities such as quizzes, polls and exercises for completion inside or away from the class. The teacher sets up a virtual room and invites the students to enter it and engage with the activities.

Nearpod is a classroom management tool that allows a high degree of functionality within the iPad’s shared network. It is another example of how teachers are harnessing the interactive nature of teaching with iPads.


Padlet, iBrainstorm and other similar apps allow students (or, as in the case shown above, teachers meeting for professional dialogue) to flick contributions across cyberspace to a publicly viewable area (either projected on a screen or viewable on the web). This slide shows padlet and the next slide shows iBrainstorm.

The Future?

Coding and app development?

New directions for content creation?


The future is, as always, hard to predict, but I offered thoughts on a few trends that look like having long term implications for our consideration of using iPads. one is the ability to create code on iPads using apps such as Hopscotch. Other app developers are surely set to follow - albeit Scratch remains a conspicuous absentee from the iPad-based coding party. The other is new forums for content creation. Microsoft’s recent acceptance of the inevitable and licensing of its Office suite for iPad may be a significant development in this regard - but there are some who say they have left it too late and the iPad community has adapted to other tools.


My own view is that iPads will prove to be an enduring legacy. I predict we will still be using tablet devices in the classrooms of the twenty-first century’s third decade, and I see no reason to suppose that the tablet of choice will not be the iPad. We must keep an eye on what the research continues to tell us, and I humbly submit that my own study and the study I am conducting with Vickie and Latifa will be important contributions to that body of research.

Thank YouRichard Harrold, ACS International Schools

[email protected]@RichardHarrold

Latifa Hassanali, Centre for Inspiring [email protected]

@Latifa1001

Vickie Bacon, Hurstpierpoint [email protected]

@vickiebacondpc

mailto:[email protected]






ipads presentation slides (ecis leadership conference, seville, april 2014)

Technology

year ipads

cost of ipads

ipads potential

ipads initiative

school year

failing school

pioneer school

school leader