MONROE: BOE updates public on iPad program

By Amy Batista, Special Writer
   MONROE — After a long wait, and requests from concerned residents and parents, the Board of Education gave a six-month update on its iPad 2 Initiative with a special presentation by Assistant Superintendent Jeff Gorman.
   Mr. Gorman presented the six-month update on the iPad initiative at the high school based on the information he collected after meeting with the curriculum team the day before.
   The iPad 2 deployment in October put the high-tech learning tablet into the hands of nearly 1,800 students and 200 faculty members, according to the district.
   ”All participants have their iPad learning device 24/7 – dramatically changing the dynamics of teaching and learning here at this new state-of-the-art high school facility,” according to a board press release.
   The 1,786 iPads, one for each student in Monroe Township High School, cost $538 each for a total of $960,868, which was factored into the $2.4 million technology expense budget the district set aside for the new high school.
   There are seven major categories focused on through the program including, vision, communication, curriculum, assessment and reporting, professional development, infrastructure and financial planning, which are all part of the iPad Master Plan, according to the district.
   Each category has a set of action steps that the district has been following since the program began.
   Mr. Gorman said that Superintendent Kenneth Hamilton gave an overview to the staff during the curriculum meeting as to why they started the program, which included the district’s mission, beliefs and reason why it is creating a one-to-one technology learning environment for students.
   ”The why is the important piece,” said Mr. Gorman. “It’s not the how and the what.”
   Mr. Gorman said that overview led to a discussion between the curriculum team and high school Principal Robert Goodall regarding the program’s progress in its second year for both teacher and students.
   According to Mr. Gorman, numerous schools were contacting the district to find out additional information and asking for advice and leadership in whether they should go electronic or not when it came to the iPads.
   ”We have focused in on the abundance of educational institutions that have reached out to us regarding the iPads,” Mr. Gorman said.
   As part of their outreach community program, the students presented two iPad workshops in local senior communities on the weekends.
   At Encore, about 50 senior residents attended one of the iPad workshops put on by one of the students and assistant principals. At the Greenbriar at Whittingham, an “iPad Device Tech Day” was held.
   Under the curriculum category, Mr. Gorman said that the curriculum is being aligned with iPad strategies and “leads to the most effective instruction for our kids.” A monitoring tool has also been created to monitor the curriculum’s writing process.
   ”Digital textbooks were on the horizon (previously) but they weren’t where they are now. So that’s a developing conversation that we had about what comes next for our students next year in the world of digital interactive textbooks,” Mr. Gorman said.
   The district is looking at some new programs and opportunities for next year in which it can share content so that people around the world can access it and challenge students and teachers to be creative and develop application programs that could be credited to them.
   The district is looking to establish “a presence” in iUniversity domain so they can start authoring content and having people access it throughout the world, according to Mr. Gorman.
   The presentation also talked about an app development course for next year in which a student or teacher could create a new application.
   The board, however, would have to have a discussion regarding policies about how that would work, according to Mr. Gorman.
   ”Whose responsibility and who benefits from that creation?” Mr. Gorman said.
   Those issues were some of the things that would need to be considered by the board before offering the course, Mr. Gorman said.
   Mr. Gorman noted that there were opportunities to improve on the program. The district logged 259 repairs to the devices as of April 26, with an average cost of $165 each, totaling $31,956.
   It has budgeted about $78,000 from the collected funds from parents, but the average in year one was $7,856.19 taken from the general fund account for repair and maintenance.
   ”I enjoyed working with the iPads my final year of school. It was a fantastic opportunity to be able to use technology every day. Honestly the future is going to be all technology so people should start getting used to it now,” a student at MTHS responded in a recent survey about the program.
   ”Every student is using the iPad, but so are a large percentage of the staff members,” MTHS Assistant Principal Jim Cemansky said. “It’s a rare occasion to walk through classrooms and not see either students or teachers with their learning device in hand.”
   Mr. Cernansky said he has noticed that the iPad has become a personal lifestyle device as well as a personal learning device at the school, with every iPad containing MTHS-specific core curriculum content and apps that drive class work and homework.
   He said he also feels teachers “are getting it,” and “using the iPad as a learning device is not an end-all, be-all object for instruction; but is becoming a tool in the instructional kit that gets their messages across.”
   Courtney Pepe teaches in the school’s MAPS Achievement Program and came from a school district participating in Maine’s statewide Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI), where every middle school student received an Apple MacBook.
   ”The iPad allows for an authentic, visual, hands-on learning experience, and I have observed the students’ level of motivation and engagement increasing,” Ms. Pepe said in a press release. “Let’s face it, we are now at the point where we need to make math and science more exciting than a video game. That’s our competition. That’s our challenge.”
   Administrators and the board are aware that a five-month sample is too short a timeline to measure the total progress of the iPad learning initiative, but it starts with key stakeholders embracing the mission, and that’s clearly been the case among students, teachers and the community at large, according to the district’s press release.
   The message should be plain and simple: This is not a technology expense, it’s an investment in the students and their future, according to Mr. Gorman.