One of the first magazine articles that came out about our iPad Summit was:
“The iPads in Education Conference That’s Not About iPads.” We loved the title. We will admit it; the title of the iPad Summit was a trick to get people who think they are interested in iPads to get really interested in great teaching and learning, which takes advantage of iPads.
Every conversation about technology needs to start with the question: What do you want your kids to be able to do when they leave your classroom, your grade, your building, or your district? What do you care most about? How might technology help you do what you care most about even better?
In our minds, schools should be leveraging iPads as “hubs of innovation” that teachers can use to nurture the types of learning skills, competencies, and habits of mind that help students develop skills for the jobs that computers cannot do. With iPads, students can research any topic that can be explored through the Internet, and they can perform their understanding in a wide variety of media. Students have a powerful and flexible device to solve problems and communicate their approaches to these problems. Helping students acquire and make sense of new information in problem-solving contexts, or to influence the decisions of others, should be our primary focus.
In preparing students for a world of work, we are also preparing them for an active role in a democratic society. Challenging students to solve unstructured problems and helping them to use information and tools to find creative solutions is helping students prepare for a lifetime of learning. In today’s world, we communicate not only through text, but through a combination of audio, visual, and other modalities. Personal, professional, and academic forms of communication are increasingly being produced in these varied forms, featuring elements such as online video and audio, interactive charts, graphs, maps, polls, and surveys. Literacy skills developed in mobile, online environments are crucial for the 21st century student and foundational to the development of effective global citizens in today’s networked world.
Putting technology in the service of learning, in our view, means putting technology in the service of preparing students to solve unstructured problems and communicate persuasively and with deep understanding. That’s our vision of what great schools do.
Your vision may be different. It should be particular to the culture and the needs of the children that you serve in your particular community. Sometimes to help teachers think about these issues in a fun way, we’ll ask the question: “What does awesome look like?” If you are doing your best possible work, better than you have ever done before, what do the learners look like on the other end? However you define your vision for powerful learning, we hope that you will reflect on it and refine it.
This article features excerpts from iPads in the Classroom: From Consumption and Curation to Creation by Tom Daccord and Justin Reich. (Learning Sciences International, 2016)
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