Last friday I went to Fontys Eindhoven to have a creative session with two groups of students which are part of the Fontys iPad-project. They have been working with the iPad for around two months now and thus should have a pretty good idea on what its strengths and weaknesses are when using it for education. I visited the faculty of Communication and of the PABO.
The session consisted of a discussion about their current experiences with the tablet in their education and a brainstorm session for their associations about cooperation/collaboration and tablets.
The sessions themselves went great. I was rather worried that it would stagnate, especially during the brainstorms, but everyone kept the good ideas coming and seemed to have a good time. Thanks again to all the students and teachers that helped me.
Use of tablets in education
As I (regretfully) expected, while the students are very much encouraged to use their iPads in their education, this hasn’t become the norm. The main issue that students seem to have is that tablets currently have little use in education. They can use their laptops for ‘real work’ (typing, etc.) and the things that the iPad could be useful for, aren’t integrated yet.
The lack of content relevant to their study is one of the biggest issues. While there is a lot of tablet content available that may help them learn, it’s relevancy to their current curriculum often is limited. Content they were looking for the most were digital version of their schoolbooks, preferably at a cheaper price.
What do they use the tablet for though? According to the students, it’s a great agenda, reader for news, mail and other quick messages and for showing and presenting things to others. Especially the PABO students got a lot of use out of the iPad by letting their own pupils at their internship play with the iPad and to use chalkboard-like applications to explain things to them immediately.
New ideas and directions
So what came from the brainstorm sessions? By following the session rules, the students came to some very nice insights, which in turn resulted in some great ideas and directions.
- Using the iPad as a way of recognizing the emotions of group member while they’re contributing. In this way, student input can be organized and this could help when making concessions, something that normally can be quite difficult in project group.
- Creating virtual meeting spaces where everything that is mentioned in any way can be recorded, be it speech, SMS or even on notepaper. A kind of functionality like Evernote, but using the capabilities of the iPad to make use of all types of recording.
- Making project groups as a whole and its members individually aware of their progress within the project. This can happen in a multitude of ways, but one of the most interesting was using music to make the users aware of their progress and that of their fellow members.
All of the ideas given by the students incorporate the idea that the iPad is something they can carry around easily and use quickly. This versatility is something that is consistently seen as a key feature of tablets. Another thing that the ideas have is the idea that awareness is important. Every method that increases the awareness of group members about their fellows in a constructive way is something that would be valuable to students.
Next step is to incorporate these directions in my concepts!
A Pad Full Of Noodles 