Green Acres School

Starting in August of 2011 all fifth and sixth graders will be involved in a pilot program where school work is increasingly achieved with the help of tablet computers. While we have been using various technologies and devices to enhance teaching and learning for many years, we believe that new devices will help engage students in the learning process in new and creative ways. Thus, we have decided for several reasons that this is the time for us to implement the first Green Acres one-to-one computing program.

Members of our technology department — David Darefsky, Pam Adams, and Connie Coker — and Treena Selak have spent the past several months investigating various options and visiting other schools. They have narrowed their focus to Apple’s iPad, which we believe is the most flexible, affordable, and widely supported portable device of its type. Teachers have spent significant time this spring working with a few demo models, considering whether the iPad and the available applications (or “apps”) would suit our teachers’ and students’ needs. Over the summer we will purchase an Apple iPad 2 for each student in the rising fifth and sixth grades and we will begin using them upon the opening of school in the fall. We will also embark on a staff training program to begin this summer. We have chosen the iPad over other options for several reasons:

• It is a common tool that will meet most day-to-day school technology needs for middle school students

• It offers a common, reliable platform

• It is easy to use and support

• It offers a wide array of apps that are easy to learn and affordable

• We believe it is the most likely platform to begin to replace physical textbooks in the near future — in fact, some of the physical texts being used next year are likely to be replaced by digital counterparts

Overall, we believe the iPad offers enormous benefits to learning — from reading to analysis to presentation to creative outlets to resource conservation and more. We are very excited about this new direction. While we know iPads won’t fully replace traditional computers or printed texts immediately, we are confident that students will develop new skills and interests as we continue to educate them for the world they will inherit. We know that families will have many questions, and we have tried to anticipate as many as we can.

iPad Questions and Answers