Tweens with the iPad classroom — Cool but not really helpful?

Abstract

The iPad as a learning tool has made its way into many elementary school classrooms worldwide. It holds a promise to be a game changer in elementary school education supporting more constructivist learning practices. This paper offers an insight into what happened when in two elementary school classrooms the students were enabled to generate both content and context for their own learning. One of the cases describes the 6th grade elementary school children's involvement in a participatory design process aiming to design an application for the iPad. The application was to support learning about media production by enabling students to publish a weekly newsletter describing their school week in words, pictures and video. The second case is about how the 5th grade children influenced their teacher and obtained permission to use one of the iPads creativity apps over a two-week period in order to learn about writing. Both of these projects were part of two larger pilot studies following the introduction of the iPad into the elementary school classroom information ecology. The children participating in the studies evaluated the projects as truly successful. The children's criteria of success were how fun and enjoyable it was to use the iPad. The teachers did not find the projects to be successful. The main criterion they used was the learning outcome. Both teachers found the learning outcome to be inferior to what they usually obtain using traditional teaching methods. Both teachers preferred to use the iPad as a plug-on to traditional ways of teaching. Although our study is small, the results point towards issues that may be important for better understanding of the factors related to acceptance of the iPad as a learning tool.