iPad uPad wePad; Going 1-1 at St Oliver Plunkett

A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to be invited to St Oliver Plunkett to be a part of their 1-1 iPad rollout to the very excited Year 6 class.

Led by their fabulous teacher librarian, Ann-Marie Furber and fearless class teacher, Brooke Maguire, with consultation from the very dedicated and talented Education Officer Learning and Teaching Technologies, Danielle Carter, the Year 6 class participated in a series of workshops in order to develop their skills before they were officially given management of their very own devices.

While the school maintains ownership, the students manage the purchasing of additional apps, and the care and maintenance of the iPads for the time they are at the school. This means the students have 24-7 access to their learning. The rollout has been a carefully managed process, with a great deal of professional development and pre-planning being done before the students had access to the devices.

The bootcamp itself was a terrific opportunity to work with a group of enthusiastic and excited Year 6 students. The workshops they participated in dealt with simple tips and tricks for managing their iPad, Email etiquette, run by Ann-Marie Furber, Teacher Librarian, Successful Searching, run by classroom teacher Brooke Maguire and Copyright and Creative Commons, run by myself, Kay Cantwell, Education Officer Digital Learning. Once the students had completed these workshops, they were officially licensed to take ‘ownership’ of their devices.

Evidence of the planning undertaken prior to this 1-1 rollout was the well established resources that had been developed in order to maximise student learning. Rather than be overwhelmed with apps, or being seduced by limited, content focused apps that had all of the bells and whistles but little quality pedagogy, lists of Core Student and Core Teacher apps were developed, as well as a list of apps suitable for Inquiry Learning.

This, along with a ‘workflow wall’ which creates a visual list of apps the students need to access in order to complete a task, allows students to make use of their iPad as a tool, rather than as a source of low level learning or as a time filler activity and games device.

The students loved both the Bootcamp, and of course the idea of having these devices to aid their learning; some of their feedback after the sessions included:

I give today a 5 because learning all these new things about this amazing device
& that we are the class to be chosen is pretty cool.

I give today a five because we had lots of learning opportunities and it was totally AWESOME!!!!!!!!

I give today a 5 because it was fun and cool way to learn

I give today a 5/5 because it was a very good learning experience for me.
Thank you to all the teachers for making it a great day!

This is a list of what the students learnt:

I’m sure the 1-1 iPad rollout at St Oliver Plunkett is going to be a huge success – due to the careful planning, the focus on learning, and the fact that the iPads are not being viewed as the be-all and end-all, but just another (albeit incredibly powerful) tool for the students to utilise in their learning journey.

Postscript:

See below for the Copyright Resource that I created to help the Year 6’s begin to understand the crazy complexities of copyright, and the potential of Creative Commons. With a content creation tool such as the iPad at their fingertips, it is vital that the students know how to access resources that they have permission to use when creating multimodal works. Link to the Presentation and Booklet.