1. California: “Digital Books Engage Students During Test Drive” (by Jill Tucker, San Francisco Chronicle)
The drudgery of solving for X flew out the door of a Presidio Middle School classroom Friday as the giddy students traded in their back-breaking algebra textbooks for an iPad touch screen filled with integers and equations that came to life with the flick of a finger.
The San Francisco eighth-graders are among 400 California middle school students participating in a pilot study funded by textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on the use of digital textbooks. The results will help determine whether the high-tech version educates schoolchildren as well or better than its wood-pulp predecessors.
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The $500 iPads come fully loaded with the students’ eighth-grade algebra textbook, and a vast array of technological bells and whistles.
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Schools in Fresno, Long Beach and Riverside also are participating in the program.
2. Abington, MA: “iPads a Hit in Abington’s Eighth-Grade History Class”
Most of the 28 students in Amy Lewis’ U.S. History class at Frolio Middle School already use iPhones, iPods and Blackberry devices.
So it came as no techno-shock when these eighth-graders powered up seven iPads for the first time last week and used them to learn about the Jamestown colony. Their collective response to the new learning tool?
Cool.
For Lewis, however, this isn’t just about cool. It’s about promoting 21st-century learning through using what she considers a highly versatile electronic tool for education.
“This is mobile learning. It’s perfect,” she said.
On Wednesday, she started a history lesson the old-fashioned way: Writing on the whiteboard – the modern dry-erase equivalent of the classic blackboard – she outlined her Jamestown lesson, then made a drastic change in technology.
“Right now, we are going to shift gears here,” she said.
Hearing their teacher’s cue, the students in groups of four powered up their iPads and got down to work.
Source: The Enterprise (Brockton, MA) via The Patriot Ledger (Quincy, MA)
See Also: Effect of E-Readers on Young People is Enormous (Anderson Independent Mail)
Via Resource Shelf
