MANHATTAN, Kan. (AP) - In Andrew Trent’s seventh grade English class at Rock Creek Junior High School, students last Wednesday learned about adverbs and adjectives.
But they weren’t learning the lesson from a book.
The 20 or so students in Trent’s class were sprawled across the classroom floor, listening to Trent’s lesson and working on language arts exercises on their iPads, The Manhattan Mercury (https://bit.ly/1HJefRt ) reported.
That’s now the norm at USD 323 Rock Creek Junior High, where textbooks have been eliminated, except in math.
This is the first year that Rock Creek is using “one-to-one technology.” The education buzz phrase means each student has a portable electronic device to use for school, whether it be an iPad or a laptop computer.
Several area schools districts have invested thousands of dollars for one-to-one technology for a variety of reasons, from convenience to leveling the playing field for students in terms of access to technology at home.
Rock Creek Superintendent Darrel Stufflebeam has several reasons for the switch, including “simply make teaching and learning more effective and more fun,” he said.
But there’s another intention, and it’s changed the traditional sense of the classroom, making textbooks and paper nearly things of the past.
“The vision for the future is that we will replace textbooks and eventually e-textbooks, which are also expensive, with web-based curriculum materials,” Stufflebeam said.
He said in many cases, those materials are free and open source, and any teacher, regardless of the grade level or subject they teach, can use them.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt that tablet computers, or as new inventions occur, some type of handheld computer device will be the primary curriculum instruction equipment in classrooms, and textbooks are definitely going to be extinct and they should be,” Stufflebeam said.
In seventh and eighth grade now, Rock Creek students are expected to bring their iPads to class every day, fully charged.
“It used to be that our junior high kids were walking around with a backpack with seven or eight at least, textbooks,” Stufflebeam said. “Big textbooks, and now all they have is this thin iPad.”
“We’re saving a lot of money on, perhaps, chiropractic bills.”
The students’ homework is all completed and turned in digitally on the iPad through individual own Cloud accounts.
“You never have the excuse of ’the dog ate my homework’ anymore,” said Rock Creek Junior High science teacher Michael Rottinghaus. “There’s nothing physical anymore. Unless they destroy the iPad, they don’t have an excuse.”
Even the students’ state assessments are taken using iPads.
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Rock Creek isn’t the only district to integrate one-to-one.
USD 329 Mill Creek Valley, a district that includes Alma and Paxico and Maple Hill, is moving forward with a one-to-one iPad initiative for the 2015-16 academic year and is currently field-testing iPad carts.
Although Mill Creek Valley won’t officially implement one-to-one until next school year, each of the district’s five schools have access to either laptop or iPad carts that supply enough devices for a classroom.
“Everybody wants to be on them so much that it’s hard to schedule,” Mill Creek Valley Superintendent James Kenworthy said.
Kenworthy also stressed creating an atmosphere for Mill Creek Valley students that will prepare them for the world they will enter upon graduation.
“We’re implementing technology because as we look at having our kids be career or college ready. That’s the world they’re going into,” he said.
Neighboring district USD 384 Blue Valley-Randolph implemented a one-to-one laptop program 10 years ago.
Blue Valley’s primary reason for integrating one-to-one was to “level the playing field,” Instructional Technology Coordinator Kathy Monser said.
Monser said giving each student a laptop eliminated the academic edge for students who already had a computer at home.
“Students without access to technology faced greater challenges than those with it,” she said. “When my kids were in school, the kids who had a computer at home or had the same computer that they had in school had an advantage.”
Additionally, Kent Unruh, USD 384 director of technology, said the district looked at one-to-one because computer lab demand was high.
“The computers got to be really popular, and everyone wanted to be on them, and everyone was wanting to use the lab,” he said.
Unruh began looking at a solution to the scheduling issue, and discovered if the district doubled its technology spending, all high school students could have their own laptops.
USD 383 Manhattan-Ogden, USD 378 Riley County and USD 320 Wamego schools do not have one-to-one technology for students currently, but they have either carts of iPads, laptops or both that can go from classroom to classroom for educational activities.
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Rock Creek purchased 16-gigabyte iPad 2s for its 150 junior high students out of its existing technology budget.
However, if the district continues with the next phase of its one-to-one initiative, it will use $135,000 out of $175,000 from New Facility Funding to purchase 32GB iPad Airs for about 300 high schoolers.
“New Facility Funding is a one-time revenue source, and this is a onetime cost essentially, that we get from the state based upon our new classrooms that we’ve built and having students in those classrooms learning,” Stufflebeam said. “But if we’re cut, we may need to use that funding source for other things.”
Blue Valley’s $100,000 lease from Apple may have been relevant 10 years ago when the district implemented one-toone, but eventually the district had to begin purchasing new devices for each freshman class.
At its most recent purchase for the 2014-15 school year, Blue Valley purchased two 10 packs of 32 GB iPad Airs instead of the 13-inch MacBook Pros it typically purchased. The 20 iPads cost $11,580 compared to the 2013-14 purchase of 15 MacBook Pros for $17,730.
“The iPad is roughly half the price of a laptop, so cost was a big thing,” Unruh said. “What the legislature is going to do with money and where we fit into all of that, that’ll be something the administration, Kathy and I will talk about.”
Unruh hopes the district can continue purchasing iPads in the future to save money.
Mill Creek Valley currently budgets $50,000 a year on technology-related expenses. Superintendent James Kenworthy is leaving it up to each school within the district to decide which kind of iPads the teachers would like their students to use - Mini or Air.
The price would range between $160,000 and $215,000.
A technology fee is assessed individually by each district at the beginning of the school year.
Rock Creek charges $25. Blue Valley charges $40. Mill Creek Valley will redistribute part of its current textbook fees as a technology fee so that costs remain at their current levels.
Free or reduced lunch students are not required to pay the technology fee.
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The transition to one-to-one in Rock Creek’s junior high didn’t happen overnight.
“It was actually smoother than I thought it was going to be,” Rottinghaus said.
The ease of transition was a big reason Rock Creek junior high was picked for the iPad initiative.
“Darrel’s always had a policy that he doesn’t like to push one-to-one technology on teachers who don’t want it, and the junior high teachers were just super excited to use it,” Rock Creek technology director Bobby Davis said.
When Davis came to Rock Creek three years ago, the district explored iPads.
“At that point, we bought an iPad for every teacher who wanted an iPad,” Davis said.
“That’s why we focus on the junior high, because (the teachers) all really love using the iPads. They would give them to kids, get them in the kids’ hands,” Davis said.
Students’ enthusiasm for the iPads and lack of textbooks is varied.
“We were excited, but didn’t know how it’d be,” seventh-grader Kayla Malbrough said.
“I think it’s a lot easier than when we didn’t have them. We don’t have to keep track of papers anymore.”
For some eighth graders who had textbooks last year, iPads seem to make things more complicated.
“It was hard to get used to writing on the iPad and not walking up and handing it to the teacher because you had to turn it in with the iPad,” eighth-grader Braden Schwarz said. Braden said getting used to the iPad took him about a month and a half.
“I would probably go back to the way it was last year,” Braden said. “Seems easier to me.”
Eighth-grader John Allen also said he felt the same way.
“It’s OK because it’s not so much carrying around, but I think it’s simpler with the textbook because it’s right there on the page,” Allen said.
There are some disadvantages to giving students a nearly-limitless, expensive electronic device, but they don’t outweigh the benefits, Trent said.
“It opens doors for students to be able to be off task, just like there are a billion great apps for school, there are a billion great games to play,” Trent said.
If students are caught playing games during instructional time or are failing a class, the teacher can disable them. But games are used as an incentive to get work done during students’ free time.
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For the most part, officials said it’s the efficiency of the classroom that has changed since the iPad program was implemented at Rock Creek.
The band teacher now has students use their iPads to record their practices, Davis said. “It ensures that they practice,” Davis said. “He can just pull up the videos and watch them all in half an hour and see how they’re doing.”
The iPads also make grading easier, Trent said. Whether or not the iPads can increase learning and information retention has yet to be determined, Stufflebeam said.
“Our achievement at this point is going to be anecdotal and subjective,” Stufflebeam said. “And that’s perfectly fine at this point. You know, we don’t necessarily think that there will be a big improvement on state assessment scores in a year or two because we’re using iPads. That’s more of a slow process in learning how to use iPads with the new curriculum.”
The new curriculum is the Kansas College and Career Ready Standards, adopted by the state in 2010.
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Rock Creek is looking to expand the iPad program to the high school next year, and possibly to its two elementary schools, but it all depends on what the state Legislature would decide to do with the district’s state aid.
Schools across the state will generally face cuts next year and the school finance formula will also be different because of the Legislature’s block grant bill, passed last month.
“We want to move away from textbooks as soon as we can,” Stufflebeam said. “During the transition, some teachers will continue to use them and some will use the digital versions (e-textbooks) with the iPads.”
But Stufflebeam said Rock Creek doesn’t have to always have iPads.
“At the time it was the right decision, but going forward without any doubt at all, we will be using different devices in classrooms.”
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Information from: The Manhattan (Kan.) Mercury, https://www.themercury.com
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