Flickr: Naomi Chung

While it may be easy to imagine how iPads can support classroom studies with reading, history, or science, some of the most groundbreaking — and creative — work with digital tools may be happening in arts classes. Schools using iPads are incorporating them in art and music classes, too — and not only as tools for measuring and remembering, but for creating as well. Whether or not students grow up to become the next David Hockney – who has created several New Yorker covers using the iPad’s drawing tool – teachers say there is value to learning to create using digital tools, especially when blended with more hands-on means of expression.

Susan Sonnemaker, a middle school chorus and band teacher at San Francisco Day School, uses school-provided tablets in limited amounts throughout the year. She finds them most useful for managing technical aspects of music class with record speed — like recording practice sessions, using a tuner app to help kids tune their own instruments, and collecting digital practice sheets. For practical matters, Sonnemaker says, the iPad has been invaluable, because streamlining and managing tuning and practice leaves more time for actually playing or singing music.

But what about using tablets for inspiration and creating new music? When it comes to creating something new, Sonnemaker says that technology helps her students be more creative, not less: “In regards to composition, students are not only more engaged in their own projects (with iPads), but they’re using real life technology,” she said. “We still do a good deal of composition exercises using old-fashioned pencil and paper. But using Garageband on the iPad is what many professional musicians use, so students are also acquiring skills to compose in the real world if they choose to continue.”

Benefield’s colleague, visual art teacher Karen Richards, notes that iPad apps have made the tools that digital artists use much more accessible for young children, but having the digital technology available doesn’t at all diminish hands-on art making. “I must stress that technology is one of many tools our students have to execute their critical and creative thinking. We believe that they must also know how to sew, woodwork, sculpt in clay, paint, draw, make prints, shoot a good photo, animate an image, and know about the artists that they stand on the shoulders of,” Richards said.

Richards describes a recent photography-based project she developed in order for children to blend the two: “They’re all taking tons of photos (with the iPads), so we worked on photography. We also learned a bit about Photoshop with Photoshop Express, and we had each student (K-8) edit and alter their photo before printing it out on watercolor paper,” she said. The final outcome was a sewing project inspired by textile artist and San Francisco Day School artist-in-residence Ehren Reed, where the students sewed into their photos.

In January of this year, the Indianapolis Museum of Art opened the Star Studio, an interactive exhibit that includes a room filled with iPads featuring a museum-customized drawing app. Tools include digital blending sticks, markers, chalk and paint brushes. Originally intended for children ages five to eight to explore the fundamentals of art alongside their parents, says Jen Mayhill, Senior Coordinator of Play and Learning at the museum, in reality the exhibit’s popularity has extended much further. “We’re seeing people of all ages and abilities using the application now.” Mayhill mentioned that, even though she doesn’t have the numbers yet, the exhibit is popular; a feature that allows visitors to email their finished iPad artwork has already yielded over 1,500 emails of art. “Purely from my own observations, I cannot imagine this space without these components, since they appear to be as popular as the tables including more traditional art mediums.”

Media and communications scholar/philosopher Marshall McLuhen wrote in 1964: “We shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us.” McLuhen’s eerily prescient observation of today’s interactive world hints at the idea that some essential aspects of what we think of as traditional art fall away as we increasingly move to more digital forms. Louisville-based artist Douglas Miller confesses to “secretly abhorring” computer-generated art, and some of his ink-and-paint hand-drawn works are actually a response to the speed of creating work via technology. “I have made images that are ‘reverse engineered’ as a commentary on the ease of computer art — I will painstakingly re-draw a mirror image of a subject when it could be done easily with a simple click in Photoshop.” Miller, 39, has noticed the generation gap when he lectures to college students who have always had computers at home and in classrooms. “I see the overuse and reliance on it in classrooms as possibly detrimental to artmaking.”

While work like Miller’s is decidedly un-tech, his painstaking efforts to stay analog highlight the tension between handmade and digital art – about what it means to be creative, and what constitutes art. In this way, can digital art become a catalyst for students, an opportunity for them to ask, what is the best means of creating my message?

Plano, Texas, high school art teacher Christine Miller, who was chosen to pilot this year’s Arts and Digital Literacy Initiative funded by the Texas Cultural Trust, explains that, while she gives students free reign to create art by both digital and hands-on means, her students are actually more reluctant to use technology than one might assume. “Not all young students are interested in utilizing technology to make their art,” she said. “There can be much resistance in my classroom when we work on an art project that is going to be produced using Photoshop. I explain to my students that these are just alternative tools, and like any other tool, you can create something digitally that would be impossible to create by hand. Conversely, you can create something by hand that you cannot replicate digitally.”

Miller teaches Art and Media Communications for the pilot program, and while her school doesn’t provide an iPad for each student, the course is designed to bring fine arts and digital literacy together. She describes the curriculum as aiming to be relevant to students’ lives through the use of technology, while also helping to foster collaboration and divergent thinking. In order to get students to focus on divergent thinking, she shows them Sir Ken Robinson’s famous Changing Education Paradigms video on the first day of school.

“It [divergent thinking] is extremely difficult for the majority of my students. Truly, only a small percentage of my students think on a level I would call divergent,” Miller said. “In the regard that technology is affecting their perceptions of the world and they regurgitate those perceptions out automatically, then yes, technology is impacting their thinking and artistic creativity in a huge way.”

The biggest influence of technology on students, Miller said, is the amount of “visual culture” in their artwork. “Because of the prevalence of popular cultural imagery everywhere, those characters (Sponge Bob, Anonymous, Pokemon) are the first images that show up in many of their art pieces. Their brains have been so saturated with this imagery, they are often unable to come up with a unique image or character of their own,” she said.

Finding – or creating – the original idea in a massive sea of ever-present information, images and text might prove difficult when it comes to art created using online and social networks on devices that can fit in a backpack or pocket — there is, simply, so much input. But Susan Sonnemaker said she doesn’t really see that happening in her music class.

“I think that in a world where kids are inundated with technology, I could see the point about less thought and creativity, but I don’t think it’s what happens,” she said. “The kids I see using iPads are able to engage in creativity in ways they couldn’t before, and in an instant, rather than waiting to get their thoughts down on paper. My students can write their original music in GarageBand in an instant, or record themselves creating music/poetry in an instant. I think it’s a tool for kids to use when they find inspiration.”

Christine Miller is reminded that, throughout history, early adopters to a new tool or technology (think photography) weren’t always readily accepted: “There are always those who protest art produced by ‘that technology’ as not being ‘authentic’ or ‘valuable’ or ‘respected’ works of art.”

All the teachers interviewed agreed that art made with the body using sensory, physical materials, is beyond valuable to understanding the artistic process, and should never be replaced (one Broadway dancer who teaches children’s dance emphasized, “Hands-on first, technology later.”). But all the same teachers also saw value in using the digital to enhance and even alter the act of creation. Where will iPad art take us? And what will we leave behind? Only the young artists will know for sure.

Flickr: Flickingerbrad

By Justin Reich

The Someday/Monday dichotomy captures one of the core challenges in teacher professional development around education technology. On the one hand, deep integration of new learning technologies into classrooms requires substantially rethinking pedagogy, curriculum, assessment, and teacher practice (someday). For technology to make a real difference in student learning, it can’t just be an add-on. On the other hand, teachers need to start somewhere (Monday), and one of the easiest ways for teachers to get experience with emerging tools is to play and experiment in lightweight ways: to use technology as an add-on. Teachers need to imagine a new future—to build towards Someday—and teachers also need new activities and strategies to try out on Monday. Both pathways are important to teacher growth and meaningful, sustained changes in teaching and learning.

In this four-part series, we’ll use the Someday/Monday template to explore four dimensions of using tablets, such as the iPad, in educational settings, examining how teachers can take students on a journey from consumption of media to curation, creation, and connection. Here, we’ll start with consumption.

Part I: Consumption

In the apocryphal photo of the iPad, the tablet rests in the lap of Steve Jobs, sitting on the stage at the iPad release demonstration, reclined in a leather chair. This was a device made for reading and watching, for sitting back, for passively consuming media. One of the signature challenges of the surge of interest in iPads is helping educators imagine the device as more than a library of books or a rolodex of apps, but as a flexible, mobile device for creating multimedia performances of understanding. Educators using iPads should start by thinking about how the device can foster critical reading of text, images, audio, and film, but consumption should be the point of departure on a journey towards more active student engagement.

To oversimplify, there are two kinds of reading that students are asked to do in school settings: focused and connected. In the focused reading mode, we hope young people will engage deeply with a text. As Mark Ott, the chair of the English Department at Deerfield Academy recently told me, “Students used to sit at a desk with nothing but a copy of Thoreau’s Walden and experience sustained engagement with Thoreau’s ideas. We want to preserve that experience in a world where devices are constantly competing for their attention.” Whether the copy of Walden is the $4.99 paperback or the free digital copy from the iBooks library, educators still believe in the importance of focused reading.

In the connected reading mode, we ask students to treat texts as nodes in a network of information. We ask them to quickly synthesize multiple readings and websites in research projects. To follow contemporary media narratives, like the recent violence in Boston, they trace stories across Twitter hashtags, livestreams of police scanners, blog posts, and newspaper articles. We ask them to read in communal settings, leveraging social technologies to allow users to share notes, highlighted passages, questions, and ideas. In an extreme form of this connected reading, Diana Kimball, a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, has formed a “24-hour book club” where groups sign up to read the same book in a 24-hour period, using Twitter to share reactions, favorite passages, questions, hunches, and insights.

Focused and connected modes of reading are both vital, but they require different habits, disciplines, and settings, and they serve different ends.

Someday

Most emerging technologies for the iPad support connected reading experiences rather than focused reading experiences. SubText allows teachers to place students in to reading groups, where they can share notes, highlight passages, ask questions, engage in discussions, and respond to teacher prompts. Reading becomes a shared, communal act, not just in classroom discussion but during the experience of reading. For collaborative research, Zotero’s web interface works great on tablets, and the tool helps groups and individual students organize diverse sources for research projects and manage bibliographic information.

A great summer project for literature or history teachers would be to explore some of these new tools and imagine how differentiated reading experiences in classes could be more social, how literature circles or book groups could collaborate in reading at home and then discuss their insights together in class.

Tablets already have tools to help reimagine connected reading, but features or apps that scaffold focused reading experiences seem further off. E-reading apps may eventually collect data about students as readers, providing some insights around pace, focus, and attention. For instance, eye-tracking and usage-tracking tools could provide measures of student reading engagement, allowing teachers to help students set goals around sustained reading. For Monday, however, it will be practices rather than apps that help students develop the capacity to read deeply.

Monday

To help students learn sustained concentration—there isn’t an app for that, yet. In the meanwhile, students need to learn both habits of mind for disciplined reading and how to control their technology environment to minimize distraction.

Howard Rheingold in his fine book NetSmart, praises the art of Attention, the habit of keeping at the front of one’s mind the purpose of using an online environment. If the purpose is focused reading, then students need to learn to recognize every move away from the text and into another online space as a distraction from sustained engagement. If the purpose is connected reading, students need to recognize how to strike the right balance between exploring a networked of hyperlinked texts while not wandering away from the core purpose of one’s reading. The first step in helping students developing these skills is naming “attention” as a skill: having students reflect metacognitively on their attention strategies and weaknesses and think about how best to exercise their own attention muscles.

Students can also learn to create a digital environment conducive to concentration. For iPads, iOS 6 has a Guided Access feature designed to help people get stuck inside a particular app. Somewhat hidden under the “Accessibility” menu in the General Settings, Guided Access allows users to “lock in” to a particular app, disable all notifications, and require a password to log out. It cannot disable distraction, but it can set it a few more clicks away. (If you have a toddler, this is also a helpful way of keeping them from accidentally logging out with the Home button or swiping to a new app). Actually shutting down all apps before reading can be a kind of ritual of concentration, like clearing way books and papers from a desk before sitting down to read. It is also more slightly more difficult to jump into a game that needs to load or a web browser preloaded with interesting pages. Such are the 21^st century methods of creating a clear desk for reading.

One of the central arguments of Rheingold’s book is that while digital tools can shape our cognitive experiences in undesirable ways, many of the drawbacks of technology are not inevitable. We simply need to develop new habits to make the most of our new tools. If our tools can distract us, then we need to learn more about focusing attention and managing distraction. Used wisely, we can choose to read Walden alone, in quite repose, or we can read Walden in community with peers and mentors, allowing students divided by home geography to read together as the Transcendentalists might have done in Emerson’s manse. Without these deliberate efforts to rethink reading we may find, as Thoreau said of the emerging technology of his own time, “we do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.”

B. Justin Reich is a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, as well as Director of Online Community, Practice, and Research at Facing History and co-Director of EdTechTeacher.

Here are five, drawn from first-hand observation at major 2012 industry conferences ranging from the more traditional Association of Educational Publishers’ and Association of American Publishers’ Content in Context to the edgy SXSWedu event in Austin. These represent one perspective of what the education industry itself is seeing, cutting across individual conferences and events.

1. PAPER IS NOT DEAD

While digital is firing up imaginations and well-equipped classrooms, paper is still the pervasive medium of choice. Digital instruction is simply finally achieving equal billing for serious consideration and state and federal funding. Despite this year’s declaration from the FCC and U.S. Department of Education that the industry should replace paper with digital textbooks by 2017, financial and technical hurdles remain.

For example, one high-profile Open Educational Resources pilot in Utah uses digital resources to create paper high school science textbooks — at an attractive per-copy price of about five dollars, versus $80 for commercial texts. Why paper? David Wiley of Brigham Young University explained at SXSWedu that the digital device cost per student was high and much of the benefit could be derived in how the material was customized, taking advantage of paper’s “unlimited battery life.”

Technical concerns were front-and-center at a Consortium for School Networking/SIIA Feedback Forum held with district and state officials during the ISTE 2012 conference. While WiFi and devices may exist in a school district, distribution can be lumpy, creating hurdles to smooth implementation. “We have schools that are one hundred percent textbook, and schools that are fully digital — a broad spectrum,” said a Louisiana-based tech coordinator.

It is, one administrator from a California district noted, the last mile Internet connection into schools and even individual classrooms “where things get interesting.” Which renders paper as a cheap, convenient delivery mechanism, a good option — for now.

2. MOOCs AND BLENDED LEARNING FLOURISH

Perhaps the most-covered trend in 2012 is the MOOC movement — Massively Open Online Courses in higher education — so pervasive it is now also getting noticed at K-12-focused events. Investors and media are paying close attention to Coursera, edX, Udacity, and other major players. But the attention paid to the newest MOOCs seemed to overshadow awareness of the progress being made in another online instructional area: K-12 web-only and blended learning.

When it comes to blended learning, one of the biggest challenges this year echoed at ed-tech conferences was agreeing on a clear definition. The Innosight Institute in 2012 simplified its original 40 blended learning profiles to a more manageable number — four models. Perhaps symptomatic of the need for clarity, at one event a representative of a well-known education company claimed it had “invented” blended learning because its reading intervention software existed on computers years ago.

3. MALLS, CHURCHES, BUSES: SCHOOL IS EVERYWHERE 

Online learning aside, the physical definition of “school” and its borders are noticeably expanding, and not just to the home.

At the EdNET 2012 conference, online program manager Gloria L. Keaton of Annapolis Road Academy in Prince George’s County Public Schools, MD, noted that online learning labs don’t have to be in school buildings. “Let’s have a lab in a shopping mall. Kids go there. Teachers go there.”

An administrator from Arizona, speaking at the CoSN/SIIA Feedback Forum, said his district started putting WiFi on buses because kids have an hour-and-a-half ride each way. At that same session, a Chicago-area district official said his schools were working with malls and other public areas to install WiFi for students to use while studying. And a Louisiana tech coordinator said churches, as gathering places, are putting in WiFi to become community centers for studying.

Summed up the CoSN/SIIA facilitator: “The last mile (for school Internet access) is changing. But you’re not responsible for that last mile.”

4. MOBILE AND BYOD: THE CLASH OF REALITY AND POTENTIAL

Discussion of mobile devices — school or student-owned — was a huge topic of conversation in 2012. (Check out ZDNet’s post tracking iPad adoption.)

But as with infrastructure, reality lagged behind enthusiasm. Flybridge Capital’s Matt Witheiler opined at SIIA’s Ed Tech Business Forum that mobile education was “under-invested.” At the CoSN/SIIA Feedback Forum, one Oklahoma district tech said he passed out iPads to all teachers on the first day of school, but “a month later all the teachers were complaining they couldn’t get online when they wanted.”

As to students bringing their own devices? It’s a misconception that BYOD is a common policy, said Peter DeWitt, principal of Poestenkill Elementary School in upstate New York and a popular ed-tech blogger, at EdNET 2012. With pressures of Common Core curriculum, teacher evaluations, new tests and other higher priorities sucking all the time out of the school day, “I don’t think schools are prepared for BYOD. I want them to be,” he said. Issues include teacher control, teaching kids to use their devices on school properly, infrastructure and number of tech support staff.

On the plus side, “The iPad has been one of the elements of seismic change, because of how it opened people’s minds,” said David Straus, vice president of product at Kno at the SIIA Ed Tech Industry Summit.

5. FLOOD OF MONEY CHASING ED TECH

This year saw so much investor, startup and news media attention paid to ed tech, that by this fall whispers began about the potential of a bubble, one that might drag teachers and students who depend on the latest products down with the overheated companies should it pop.

At year’s end the whispers had become chatter as investors met with the industry at the SIIA Ed Tech Business Forum in New York City. “There’s more money than talent,” said City Light Capital’s

Josh Cohen, bluntly stating a common attitude. He added that while his firm has invested in higher education, it has “been looking to do a K-12 deal since 2004 and still haven’t found the right one.” Overall, Chief Strategy Officer Diana Rhoten of Amplify observed, “The startup end of the space is extremely over-inflated.”

As for the traditional educational publishers, only Pearson is an active strategic investor among the major players, according to Baran Rosen of Whitestone Communications. Others, such as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and McGraw-Hill, “have fallen behind” due to internal issues, flagging sales and other distractions. But Rosen noted investors view the appeal of education as huge, “second only to health care” in size.

MISCELLANY

Finally, there’s the trend category of “lots of talk,” nascent widespread adoption. Big or portable education data is not quite there yet, but there’s been lots of promising activity with the Shared Learning Collaborative and the U.S. Department of Education’s MyData initiative. The maker movement is cool, but hardly ubiquitous in most traditional K-12 schools. Digital badges for informal (and some formal) learning trumpeted by Mozilla Open Badges and the MacArthur Foundation are still in early development stages.

There’s just one caveat about trying to divine trends from these half-dozen events. As Justin Serrano, President of Kaplan K12 Learning Services, quipped at the Software and Information Industry Association’s Ed Tech Industry Summit last spring, “Sometimes these conferences are a little bit like a Dead show. You see the same people moving from one to another.”

Frank Catalano is a consultant, author and veteran analyst of digital education and consumer technologies. He tweets @FrankCatalano, consults as Intrinsic Strategy, and writes a column for GeekWire. He attended every event listed here, and even spoke at a few of them.

Julia Hum/Educreations

One of the biggest, fastest shifts in ed tech the last couple years has been the evolution from the use of large interactive whiteboards to the use of mobile, agile multi-purpose apps. Currently, there are at least six products, all competing to become teachers’ favorite. Replay Note, ScreenChomp, ShowMe, DoodleCast Pro, Knowmia, Explain Everything and Educreations all offer teachers the ability to record the visual and audio components of a “whiteboard” lesson on their iPads, and share it online.

Educreations is one of the top contenders, teachers say, mostly because of its simple user interface and multi-functionality. “I use it when I need to make quick videos in class,” said Ramsey Musallam, a high school chemistry teacher in San Francisco. Other features that teachers seem to love: the app offers more than one page for recording; the user can import images from other places and format them easily within the video; there’s a text feature so students don’t have to contend with messy teacher handwriting, and perhaps best of all, it can be used on desktop computers, not just an iPad.

One of the values educators look for in tech tools is student usability, and with Educreations, teachers say the tool is straightforward enough to incorporate into student work. Musallam says he always starts his class with a challenge question, which he solves in an Educreations video that he uploads to his website. There he keeps an archive of challenge problems that kids can look back on if they get stuck. He doesn’t give them the answer right away because he wants them to try working it out for themselves first. “Educreations allows me to dump direct instruction in little packets when they need them,” Musallam said.

He also has his students create inquiry videos where they pose a question for a peer to solve. Musallam actually prefers ScreenChomp for these because he has five classes of 30 students each using shared iPads off a school cart. He doesn’t want to deal with logging in and out of an Educreation account and ScreenChomp creates a random URL that the student can send to him.

Why inquiry videos? Students can release little bits of information along the way, mirroring the problem solving process.

“One of the problems with written textbooks is that kids get all the info right up front and that’s not how the problem solving process works,” Musallam said.

OTHER USES

Elementary school teachers are finding totally different uses for Educreations, many of which are student-based. Educators at a public elementary charter school in Altadena,Calif. have found the app useful for testing reading fluency. Sebastian Cognetta, the school’s director, says students record themselves reading, sometimes stopping to identify challenging words. Cognetta says teachers at his school use this method with kids who are slow to pick up reading because they can listen back to old recordings and mark their own improvement. He also noted that Educreations allows teachers to use the “work sample approach” with kids struggling in math. In the work sample approach a struggling student gets a fully solved problem that she has to explain. With Educreations the student records herself describing how to reach the correct answer, while taking notes on the problem itself.

Debbie Taylor, who teaches sixth grade math, science, health, and technology, said her students use the app for presentations — illustrations and their voice recordings to present keys ideas on Newton’s Laws of Motion, for example — and to create tutorials for their classmates.

She also uses the app a formative assessment choice. Through the class account, students demonstrate and explain a process or application, which she later reviews. “Being able to see their process and hear their thinking provides higher levels of analysis,” she wrote on a MindShift Facebook post.

Educreations works well for teachers who want to include some element of the “flipped classroom”approach. It’s also useful for educators who can create a video of an explanation once, rather than having to repeat it to every student individually. Teachers spend a lot of time before class, after class, between classes and at lunch helping students who come looking for one-on-one help with the same types of questions.

“If we don’t save teachers time then we don’t stand a chance at being adopted,” said Wade Roberts, one of the founders of Educreations. Roberts used to run a tutoring company in Atlanta before he got interested in the social app movement and designed the successful app Pieces of Flair for Facebook. But he never forgot his experience tutoring and wanted to find a way to combine his success in the programming world with his passion for education. When he looked at the ed-tech software on the market, he was disappointed. “It’s far too hard for the average teacher to be involved in this,” Roberts said. “If this is the future of learning there needs to be a platform for the average, non-tech savvy teacher to participate.”

Still, there are a lot of things that both Roberts and teachers would like to see improved on the app. For one, the whole video has to be made in one take – so no room for mistakes. Many people want an editing tool, as well as an erasure tool. Roberts says he hopes the app can become more interactive, integrating quiz questions into videos as they progress. He’d also like to provide some way for teachers to save templates for one another.

Ultimately, Roberts wants to create a huge repository of short education videos where kids can find any lesson from any teacher whenever he or she needs it. He doesn’t think that will make teaching or the learning irrelevant. “Just because the info is there and available doesn’t necessarily mean that grasping it will be unnecessary,” he said. No matter how many ways a student learns the material, the true test is whether he can solve the problem or explain the chemical reaction. There’s no substitute for that.

Lenny Gonzales

By Terry Heick

When it comes to deciding how or whether to use iPads, schools typically focus on budget issues, apps, networking logistics, check-in and check-out procedures, school and district tech-use policies, hardware precautions, and aspects of classroom management.

But it’s also important to think about instructional use, and to that end, consider the following questions.

1.   What are the goals for iPad implementation? Engagement, access to digital textbooks, access to digital environments, primarily media consumption, media production, or a blend of everything?

2.   What can the iPad do that is not possible–or is clunky and cumbersome–without it? That is, what learning problems does the iPad solve?

3.   What sort of instructional planning are you using–traditional units, project-based learning, game-based learning, or something else? That is, what style of learning are you expecting the iPad to actuate?

4.   How should your instructional design and lesson planning be revised as a result of the iPad? What “fail-safes” should be built into activities to ensure learning is possible when the technology misbehaves and doesn’t do what you ask?

5.   What is your own comfort level with technology? What digital, physical, and human resources are available when something is needed?

6.   Will the iPad’s use always require special, specific planning? What changes could you make to allow the iPad’s application in the classroom to be more organic and fluid?

7.   What is the role of learner in iPad use? Can they choose which apps they use to solve a problem? Suggest better apps for better problem-solving? Switch between tasks, assignments, and activities freely, or a follow-only approach?

8.   Is the learning environment you design and manage technology-centered, standards-centered, data-centered, or student-centered?

9.   How can you experiment with new instructional styles to take advantage of mobile learning devices in the classroom? For example, quick, open-ended, digital problem-solving competitions that utilize quick bursts of higher-level thinking skills in individual and collaborative arrangements.

10.   How committed are you to overcoming unforeseen challenges?

Also worth considering: How can parents, families, and local businesses be involved in procuring, managing, or integrating iPads in the classroom? Is BYOD (Bring Your Own iPad) possible? How successful has the curriculum and instructional design been in the school prior to iPad deployment? Further, how is “success” defined in the school–authentic projects, creative thinking, or standardized-testing proficiency? What are the “terms of deployment” in the school? 1:1 or 1 per class? Do students have open access based on need, or teacher planning?

These kinds of questions can help you get the most out of the iPad’s use in your classroom.

This post originally appeared on TeachThought, where Terry Heick is the director of curriculum.

The survey, which included 1,200 parents of children age 2 to 6, showed that, of those who owned iPads (462 in total), an overwhelming majority — 89.9 percent — said they read mostly print books and some e-books, compared to 7.5 percent who say they read print books and e-books equally with their children, and only 2.7 percent who read mostly or exclusively e-books.

But the report also draws an interesting conclusion about how print books or e-books (in this case, iPads with multimedia features) are alternately preferred in certain situations. During times when parents want to read with their kids (co-read, as the report calls it), print books are preferred, even when e-books are available. But parents prefer e-books when they’re traveling or commuting.

Mixed reactions were reported in other aspects too. Although parents recognize that e-books can play a role in developing their kids’ literacy skills, especially when kids are reading alone, many iPad owners — a full one-third surveyed — said that sometimes “it’s just too difficult to read with a child on digital devices, and nearly as many are worried the child would start to want to use the iPad all the time.” Overall, in fact, 60 percent of parents said they prefer their child to read traditional print books.

This report follows another, much smaller survey of 32 parents, which examined the difference between recall and comprehension when kids read e-books versus print books.

Of course, nuances in parents’ motivations should be further examined, the report’s authors write, with the following questions: