High-tech educational tools are producing results among students lucky enough to try them

‘O ROMEO, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?,” a tragic heroine calls into the Verona night – but was there moonlight, a chorus of crickets, or a rustle of wind in the trees?

For the girls at Rathdown School in Glenageary, using iPads in class is bringing them one step closer to the action.

“The engagement is really the secret weapon,” says principal Anne Dowling of how the coveted Apple devices are changing teaching and learning at her school. “Whether it’s a gifted child or a student who is struggling and is totally disengaged, if they are enthused and engaged, you have won the battle.”

While some affluent secondary schools have long boasted student laptops, Rathdown has skipped straight to the sleek iPad.

A fee-paying school with enviable technology infrastructure already in place – a computer room with 50 iMacs, campus-wide wifi with routers in several classrooms, it was never the kind of school where you had to lean out a window to get a signal.

With a great information technology backbone in place, the school decided to use its Department of Education IT grant to finance 24 new Apple tablets, the four-month pilot of which has just finished.

“We decided we would begin with the teachers who were most comfortable using them,” says Dowling of the devices now used to deliver the maths, Spanish and science curriculums.

When iPads arrived before Christmas there was pandemonium, admits maths teacher Horst Punzet. “I got them to use them before the holidays so they got over the squealing factor.”

How does it work in the classroom? With Junior Cert science students required to memorise 30 experiments and to regurgitate three or four on exam day, the iPad swaps a flat textbook for 3D visuals.

“We have videos of all 30 experiments. Students can just click into them and watch the whole process of setting up the equipment, the chemicals you need and see what happens, and the great thing is the experiment always works,” he jokes. “Next, we’d like to record our own students doing the experiments.”

In maths, the devices are taking the snooze factor out of statistics. “Something the girls weren’t that familiar with was collecting data, so we did an online survey using the iPads.”

“You don’t have to uproot the class and move them to the computer room. A lesson can flow and that’s the really nice thing about the iPad,” says Punzet.

The iPads are working for students needing extra help too, observes Dowling. “Students who have completed a task will automatically go on and explore,” she says. “With a traditional textbook, the chances of a student saying ‘I want to go on to the next chapter’ doesn’t happen.” Using the device as a basic e-reader has its advantages, too, according to Punzet. “It can replace carrying that huge bulk of a bag into school; the weight of some of those bags is unbelievable. To replace that with something you can hold with two fingers has a huge advantage for students.”

While the iPad’s touch-screen puts paid to the age-old pastime of doodling in the margins, isn’t instant internet access a greater distraction to students?

Accessing the internet via a National Centre for Technology in Education portal means Facebook and e-mail are off-limits, but with plans for all students to buy their own devices, that may become more of a problem. Punzet says many educational publishers are tentative about the move online, providing just a PDF of their texts. Interactivity could be better.

“In a maths book, you should be able to click into Excel, produce a graph and print it,” he says.

Demonstrating an interactive text of Alice in Wonderland, where a beautifully illustrated heroine grows in size before your eyes, he says: "Once all text books are like this, it's going to enhance things a huge amount."

For the moment, the school will hold off on rolling out iPads to all students.

“If applications were available that were directly relevant to the curriculum and all the textbooks were available as e-books, we would say yes, roll it out to everyone,” says Dowling.

For Punzet, 12 to 24 months should see progress. “It’s almost there, but at €500 a pop, it’s very expensive to say ‘Oh, if only it could do this or do that’.”

On the other side of the State, in Ransboro National, a 10-teacher primary school near Strandhill in Sligo, Damien Quinn’s class has clocked up an impressive 150 followers on Twitter. The class bear is also a prolific tweeter.

With the four- to nine-year-olds in the school using iPod Touches for a year now, the devices haven’t yet lost their appeal.

“There’s a huge array of apps that can suit every area of the curriculum,” says Quinn. “Everything from language-based apps to maths, logic puzzles, games books and podcasts.”

Of the 30 devices loaned to the school in a pilot project with the Department of Education and Apple Ireland, Quinn says, “the kids still say, ‘Can we play on the iPod?’, which is interesting because they think they are playing, but I am getting them to learn.”

Of an art project students have just completed, he says, “We linked the iPods into Twitter where the idea was to create some sort of digital art. We got some apps from the app store, they designed their art and then we put it on Flickr and tweeted about it,” he explains.

A veritable IT “Mr Chips”, Quinn’s passion for technology in education has clearly rubbed off on his students.

“I have eight-year-olds telling me how to import a photo into Photoshop, crop it and resave it,” he says.

While the children clearly love it, how is Apple for teacher? “Initially there was a lot of prep . . . there’s an unbelievable array of apps, it’s almost like a pin in a haystack.

“I’m on Twitter, so I follow other teachers internationally, and you pick up things that other schools are using.”

Ransboro, along with pilot schools in Kilkenny and Wexford, also uploads reviews of apps best suited to the Irish curriculum.

Now awaiting delivery of its very own set of iPod Touches, having used its National Centre for Technology in Education grant and some of its own money to fund them, Ransboro school clearly favours IT in the classroom. With the iPods clearly a hit with students, is it hard to get them to focus when the gadgets are powered off?

“There are some days when we don’t use them at all,” he says. “If it suits me to use it as part of lesson, I will, but we’re not stuck to it. The whole thing with technology really is that it’s only a tool that you use to deliver the curriculum. If your whole focus is on the tool, you’ve lost something.”

You can follow Quinn’s class on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/mrquinnsclass

For technology in primary teaching tips, see http://www.seomraranga.com/