High school ditches textbooks for ipad

Pilot project to expand to whole school; costs a concern for smaller districts

SAN JOSE, Calif. — It’s midmorning and the faces of the students in Tim Wesmiller’s religious studies class are bathed in the baby-blue glow of their ipad screens.

Instead of sitting in rigid rows of desks staring at a blackboard, kids huddle in groups to brainstorm and blog about Indian culture. Lessons flash from tablets to digitized white board and back. The “lecture” is a blend of Youtube videos and interactive maps. There’s very little paper and no sign of chalk.

Faculty and students in this two-year ipad pilot project at Archbishop Mitty High School say this is the future of education.

“We still use paper and pencils sometimes,” says Jeremy Pedro, a soft-spoken junior. “But our homework is mostly digital. Paper homework is a thing of the past.”

So are one-dimensional science lessons, teachers glued to the front of the classroom, and backbreaking backpacks stuffed with textbooks.

“The richness and potential here is much greater than just e-books,” Principal Tim Brosnan says. “The students have embraced the idea that learning happens not just in class but at home and anywhere else they can go online. The ipad’s not some magic pill, but seeing students collaborate on them seems to add more life to the learning process.”

For the past two school years, Mitty’s pilot project has put Apple’s popular tablets in the hands of 250 students in 14 classes. Next fall the school will rent ipads for all 1,680 students and 104 teachers, putting Mitty at the vanguard of a quickening trend toward digitized education.

“What’s coming this fall is huge, and I think you’ll see it happening in every school across the country in the next five years,” Brosnan says. “It’s almost as if the ipad was the device we were all waiting for.”

John Couch, Apple’s vice president of education marketing, says the ipad’s light weight, tech prowess and versatile user interface make it a valuable learning tool for “a generation of kids who grew up in a digital world.”

“They want to express themselves in class through the same media-rich environment they observe around them outside of school. I see the ipad as a classroom without walls,” says Couch, adding that the tablet is just the latest in a long line of Apple’s efforts on the education front. “We’ve built this ecosystem with a lot of content like ibooks that’s not just digital but truly transformational, with interactivity and other features that traditional textbooks don’t have.”

While Apple’s dominance in e-learning is certainly not guaranteed, considering how many hardware companies and content providers have already jumped into the space, the Cupertino, Calif., tech giant certainly has a solid toehold. And it owes a lot of that success to the ipad’s seductive lure.

Earlier this month, Apple said it would offer interactive digital textbooks and tools for teachers to create their own books using iauthor. This was a longtime dream of Apple’s late Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs, who once predicted the ipad would make print textbooks obsolete.

That’s already coming true in Wesmiller’s classroom, where students are following an online textbook their teacher personally crafted as a dynamic mashup of content from the Library of Commerce, Youtube and Google maps.

But the costs of going digital have raised concerns that struggling public districts will never be able to afford tablets for every student, widening a digital divide between public and private schools. Mitty bought the first 250 ipads at about $500 each, but will rent the ones next fall and charge each student an as-yet-undetermined monthly fee folded into their tuition. Even with those fees, Brosnan said parents will save money over time because an $80 print textbook, for example, will be replaced by a $14 ibook version.

Down the hall, science teacher Kate Slevin’s class focuses on the subject of momentum.

“OK, guys,” she says. “Open your ipads.” They use a notetaking, audio-recording application called Notability that lets users write notes with their fingers over text on the screen. They can import a syllabus or a book chapter, create bullet outlines, and record the lecture in case they miss something. And they can e-mail their marked-up documents to the teacher, as Zak Hovey, 14, did.

“I love the ipad,” he says, “because everything you need is in your hands and all in one place.”

Fellow student Jennifer Canfield, 14, uses the tablet in her Spanish class, “and it makes working on pronunciation and looking up words much easier than using a printed book.”

Asked whether she’s tempted to wander the Web, a concern some educators have raised, Canfield replied: “I’m not that kind of student.”