A school that I work closely with is very shortly going to be upgrading its ICT facilities, and what a difficult array of decisions it faces, especially with a limited budget! Currently, the school has a computer suite with seventeen PCs based around RM’s Community Connect network. Teachers all have a laptop which can be connected to a Smartboard and a visualiser. Teacher laptops can access the internet, but there is no facility to share resources via the network. In addition to the RM network, there is also an ‘admin’ network for the small number of office PCs which have SIMs installed. There are small number of PCs dotted around the school for pupil use, but the school was recently criticised for lack of use of ICT in lesson observations. Additionally, the school has a website and an as yet unused Moodle VLE.
As such, the priority for the school is to enhance the wider curriculum for pupils via the use of ICT, and to ensure pupils’ ICT skills are sufficiently developed. My first thoughts are to recommend that the school installs a secure, fast wireless network, allowing pupils to use a wide range of devices across the curriculum. Following this, teachers could then use class/group sets of netbooks and other electronic devices such as I-Pod touches and I-Pads in lessons both in and out of the classroom. An essential aspect of the setup would be a strong and reliable wireless setup; having worked in a school with inconsistent wireless networking, I’m aware of the frustrations of ‘no network available’; if teachers lose faith in the system working properly then the hardware will sit unused!
Netbooks are very reasonably priced, and with a range of ‘free’ online software (often Flash based), allow pupils to enrich the curriculum in many, many ways. However, many schools are exploring using Apple products as an alternative or addition to traditional PCs, and in this post I am musing about whether or not I would recommend Apple to this particular school. Why use Apple when similar specification products can often be purchased with a lower cost?
Historically, Apple products have been associated with excellent movie editing and rendering, and a real selling point of the latest iPod Touch is the possibility of having an ‘all in one’ movie maker; the iPod Touch (4th generation) has a built in HD video camera, and with the iMovie app, pupils can potentially film, edit and publish movies using a single device from anywhere within our wireless network. Having used iMovie on an iPhone 4, I can verify that this is possible (I edited a movie and published to Facebook in a car journey the other week), but a bit fiddly! Given the choice, I would edit movies on a larger screen. Of course, an iPad 2 has a larger screen and HD recording, making the job a little bit easier, but an iPod touch can be purchased for under £200! ‘Traditional’ movie making devices such as the reasonably priced Creative Vado can be purchased more cheaply, but such devices don’t offer Internet access and the wide range of apps available for Apple devices.
Having filtered Internet access available so readily for pupils via small devices in a primary school would be very desirable. So many of us now quickly use a smartphone to access questions we may have about a topic in our general lives, and for pupils to have something similar would surely aid learning (with the obvious reservations of ensuring information is accurate and from a trustworthy source). A small device such as an iPod Touch would be unobtrusive (although easily lost) on a pupil’s desk, and could be used in addition to traditional writing tools. There are, of course, so many good educational websites that could be used in lessons; it is such a shame that Apple refuse to budge on the Flash front, though – as many good education sites use Flash for the content and interactivity.
Garage Band on iPad
On the ‘app’ front, there are an increasing number of apps that are appropriate and useful for primary aged pupils. Keynote is an excellent equivalent to MS PowerPoint, Pages a word processor (equivalent to MS Word), and Numbers a spreadsheet (equivalent to MS Excel). The Garage Band app for the iPad 2 is great fun and would be an excellent addition for delivering a music curriculum, and very sensory for primary pupils.
A range of art and photography apps are available, including Artrage for iPad, which many PC users will be familiar with, allowing pupils to completement the art curriculum. Additionally, an increasing number of primary school aged ‘reading books’ are available as apps; these have the multisensory advantages of music/speech/animation and interactivity, and they are reminiscent of the CD-Rom based talking books that were popular in the late nineties. I’ve explored several of the ‘Math’ developing apps, some of which have seemed reasonable for ‘drill and practice’ type activities, but many are American and the methods may clash with the Primary Strategy. Telecommunications apps such as Skype could be used to allow pupils to video conference from the classroom, if the filtering system allows. Prices for apps range from free to around £6, so can be very good value.
From the previous paragraphs, it may be easy to assume that I’m advocating buying iPods and iPads; however, I have quite a few reservations and questions that I need to have answered before I proceed. Having had a couple of hours at our local Apple store working with the education expert, I left feeling strangely defensive about PCs and alternative MP3 recorders and video cameras. I was barraged with lots of quotes, seemingly straight from Steve Jobs, about how ‘everything Apple just works’, how terrible Flash is, and how superior Apple productivity software is to its competitors. The education expert couldn’t tell me when Safari for iPad/iPhone was going to be updated so that it worked with Moodle properly (WYSIWYG text editor doesn’t work as of writing), and I still don’t quite know how we would set the devices up to work with school’s existing printers (sure we can fix this one easily enough though). All of the Apple devices are very desirable, which does make me worry how long they would survive in school! It is also important that we don’t confuse ‘desirability’ with ‘purposeful for education’ too!
So hopefully you can understand my dilemna, especially when you consider that touch screen keyboards, although improving, still aren’t as good as the more tactile traditional keyboards, especially for little fingers, and that an iPad is roughly twice the price of a netbook (which has a keyboard and can run Google Sketchup)!
In this post, I haven’t got as far as considering other tablets (Android/RIM) or iMacs as a replacement for the current RM PCs; I’ll save this one for my next post!
Any thoughts appreciated….
