iPads in the classroom: Fraser Speirs gets it in the neck from idiots, despite being right
If you’re in education, go and read Fraser Speirs’ blog. Of late, it’s recounted his fascinating experiment of introducing iPads into the classroom for his young students. Inevitably, the Apple-hostile crowd has leapt on every article reporting on the story, and the national press has wrongly claimed that iPads are being used for everything in class, rather than as a supplementary tool; therefore, going to the source is your best bet.
Today, Speirs answers some of his critics, and the point I wanted to highlight was this one:
“Won’t the children lack ‘proper’ computer skills?”
This has been a criticism levelled at Speirs since he revealed the iPad experiment, and it is, frankly, utter bullshit. Think back to when you were at school. How does the technology compare to what you’re using today? In my case, rampaging as I am towards my mid-30s, I grew up with BBC Micros and then, in secondary school, the Acorn Archimedes. By sixth form, the school had some Macs in the graphics department, but both the hardware and software was a world away from even the technology I used at university (Macs for video editing, PCs for web access) and it certainly has little resemblance to what I work with today.
Even kids who grew up with PCs at school during the 1990s or later will find that many things have moved on. To that end, the only things that are really important are:
- Providing the best environment for children to learn in, regardless of the technology. If PCs work for you, that’s fine; but if iPads (or some other tablets) engage the children more, and are more practical and manageable, by all means use them. Or have a mix of technology (as in Speirs’ school);
- Ensuring that you’re teaching the children foundation skills in technical subjects, and that you use transparent software elsewhere. In other words, don’t teach software. Most applications in use today simply won’t exist in over a decade’s time when kids entering school leave education. However, fundamental skills (even in the likes of spreadsheet work, word processing, image manipulation and video editing) will always have some kind of analogue.
Speirs sums this up nicely in his article:
This is a constant tension in educational technology: do you teach for the current ‘business environment’ or do you teach for learning? I prefer the latter. I’m not doing this just to produce the next generation of cubicle fodder.
The difference between the Acorn Archimedes and an iPad is that going from an Acorn Archimedes to a PC is a step down in complexity (so the things you’ve learned with the Acorn, such as how hierarchical file systems work, apply to the PC, but everything is a bit simpler and more graphical), while going from an iPad to a PC is a step up in complexity.
So I think the question what exactly an iPad should be used for in the context of a classroom is a fair one.
Presumably, though, the iPads are not used for teaching these kinds of things, but rather as replacement for textbooks and such, so I’m not sure it’s an issue in this case.
@Lukas: Thing is, who’s to say that hierarchical file systems will exist in anything like the way we understand them today by the time kids leave school? Who’s to say that the PC as we know it will exist? To my mind, the best thing for kids—and especially young kids—is to provide aids for teaching that get out of everyone’s way and just let them get on with learning. This photo nicely sums up why iPads and similar devices could potentially work very nicely in a classroom environment—it doesn’t alter said environment that much, rather than computers, which typically live in their own room, or at best (with laptops) tend to get in the way.