Mobile Devices Pilot

Byron High School is looking to the future of computing. In this exploration, the school and district wanted to assess the effectiveness of tablets as a classroom tool, at least when used as a shared tool (in the pilot, each participating teacher only has 5 devices). Depending on the results of the pilot, it may inform the addition of a 1-to-1 computing program.

Five teachers from different subject areas were selected at Byron High School to participate in the pilot. Since my coach Troy Faulkner was selected, it enabled me to also participate in the group. Once the devices were handed out, each teacher started to develop new ways to integrate the devices into the classroom. In math, the simplest use case was watching videos and accessing solutions on Moodle. In Algebra 2, I asked students to create their own videos on applications of logarithms using the tablets. Though there were a few technical issues, it ran much smoother than most video production projects that I have ever been involved with due to the simplicity of the tablet. In Statistics, I used the tablets as a data collection device -- students used the Google Docs app to fill spreadsheets with hundreds of numbers while playing Minute to Win It games. Finally, I did a joint project with another TPC intern teaching Psychology using surveys on how people think, feel, and behave. In all projects, the tablets enabled greater mobility and removed distractions from the working environment that more frequently occurred in computer labs.

Beyond the classroom, the pilot was led by the school's technology director, Jen Hegna. She led the group in a morning workshop where we shared progress, ideas, and new apps with each other. Though I consider myself very technology-literate, I gained a number of new ideas from the group session and the dialogue that continued afterward.

Below are the devices we used: Apple's popular iPad2 and the Android-based Motorola Droid Xoom