The thought of using iPads in the classroom might leave some teachers squirming: another change to contend with; another expensive gimmick that will end in tears. But the iPad has the unique ability to provide almost complete freedom of outcome without impinging on a teacher's personal style. In my classroom, iPads act as a:
• computer
• exercise book
• homework-filing system and planner
• mini-whiteboard
• camera
• mp3 and mp4 player
• multimedia recorder
• portable and updatable register
The iPad's various applications can liberate teachers from needing to book computer rooms, recording devices, flip-cameras etc and enable fluid communication between teacher and student – at home and in school. In modern foreign languages (MFL), teaching practice sometimes makes the teacher seem like the font of all knowledge – it works loosely on the premise that most students will not travel to the country whose language they study. This can create an understandable anxiety that as soon as students leave the classroom all knowledge imparted will evaporate and everything will need to be delivered again next week.
While technology is not a magic bullet for autonomous learning – if it were IT would surely be the most successful subject nationally – the iPad has helped considerably in bridging the gap between home and school in the hands of skilled teachers. In 2012 my school embarked on an iPad one-to-one scheme – all students in years 8 to 11 received an iPad in the autumn term of 2012, followed by the all year 7 students in the 2013 spring term.
The reasons for adopting the Pad scheme were: to ensure equality of access to the internet at school and at home; to prepare students for working and living in a digital age; to support self-led research and problem solving; to improve the quality of feedback, home learning and collaboration.
But the success of the scheme depends on the teachers and how they use the online world. Our students now have access to our materials via web links to online storage; a virtual learning environment now exists which houses previous homework, lesson materials and revision guides; marking, feedback and targets are now available to individual students digitally so they can follow and manage their own progress.
Here are some ways the iPads work in our language teaching:
Pre-lesson
The teacher can upload all the slides and resources onto their shared-filing system in advance so that students know what they will be studying in advance – Showbie is really useful for this. This also allows students requiring more support to access it. For example, teachers can upload mp3 files (audio files) onto Showbie so students can familiarise themselves with new vocabulary and pronunciation, helping them to feel confident to take part in the lesson. This can also fire up other students' enthusiasm; they may even have anticipated the next step on the learning pathway, and so they arrive eager to share their ideas and wanting clarification.
During the lesson
A typical language lesson may start with a quick mind-mapping session on everything pupils know on a given topic so I can assess what areas need more work – simplemind+ is a useful tool for this.
During lessons, I use the website, todaysmeet.com, to provides real-time feedback for students so they can see their collective ideas build on the whiteboard. This may feel like a gimmick, but it really works. The pupils are all digital natives and seem to fare best when fed a digital diet.
After a short amount of teaching on a particular grammar point, students might then complete an interactive quiz, using Socrative. This is a really useful assessment for learning (AFL) strategy as the results are collated and fed back to the teacher automatically via email.
Most students will then work on an ongoing project – in my lessons it's an MFL ebook (that we put together using bookcreator) where students create a personal project comprising relevant photographs, useful phrases and interactive sentences that play back their pronunciation, stop-motion diagrams of German subordinating conjunctions (istopmotion), etc. This is a legible, unlosable and interactive study guide that builds up throughout students' school careers. It can't end up in the bin with the ringing out of the summer term because even if some students accidently (deliberately) lose (delete) their work, it is available, unscathed, from the cloud.
Homework
I set homework through an online planner, firefly, that parents can also access. This is gives much more scope to the type of tasks you can set students: videos, audio files, interactive quizzes, extended writing, games – anything is fair game provided the learning outcomes are met. One really popular homework activity for MFL students is a listening exercise or a vocabulary-building test using Quizlet, a tidy online application that creates addictive games out of bilingual vocabulary lists by uploading spreadsheets – think candycrush for key stage 3.
The iPad is supremely flexible and will slot into lessons any which way – however a teacher decides. But the iPad is merely the tool – albeit a highly sophisticated one – at the service of a professional and is worth nothing without the relationships a teacher carefully builds. While the iPad enables blue-sky thinking as regards the limitless creativity of digital natives it neither notices when Jonny begins to slip through the net nor when Myra glazes with boredom. We do. It is the ability to marry teacher and tech that makes the iPad so formidable.
Thanachit 015 3EN
Home 
