Galion primary teachers introduce iPads to students

Sarah Ein­se­len — Staff

Kinder­garten teacher and Galion Pri­mary tech coach Den­nise Holtzapfel assists 5-year-old Whit­ney Kim­ble with the “Pearl Diver” iPad math game. Holtzapfel and fel­low teacher Jenny Jack­son vis­ited sev­eral Galion Pri­mary School class­rooms last week, intro­duc­ing stu­dents to the school’s new iPads.

By Sarah Einselen

Inquirer Reporter

Stu­dents and teach­ers at Galion Pri­mary School were intro­duced en masse to the school’s iPads last week dur­ing train­ing ses­sions held for each class.

In one the of the tech ses­sions on Wednes­day, Jan. 25, tech­nol­ogy coaches Den­nise Holtzapfel and Jenny Jack­son helped kinder­garten­ers in Holtzapfel’s class turn on iPads and find apps. They started the chil­dren off with a math game called Pearl Diver, leav­ing the chil­dren to play it on their own after they started the game.

The two teach­ers strolled through the class­room, crouch­ing next to chil­dren as they needed help with any issues or questions.

Cindy Voss, pri­mary school prin­ci­pal, said the train­ing ses­sions were designed to get stu­dents used to cur­rent tech­nol­ogy. The school has had its bank of 28 iPads since August, she said, but until this month they were only used by inter­ven­tion spe­cial­ists to work with chil­dren with spe­cial needs.

The young­sters can be intim­i­dated by the iPads, said Voss, but get the hang of them quickly. Some chil­dren in Holtzapfel’s kinder­garten class had already used iPads—mainly for accom­mo­dat­ing spe­cial needs, said Holtzapfel, and partly because she had already been trained to use them.

Sarah Ein­se­len — Staff

Sev­eral Galion kinder­garten­ers play var­i­ous iPad games, includ­ing Pearl Diver and Tangrams.

“This is really our first time tak­ing them into every class,” Voss com­mented. “We’re try­ing to elim­i­nate the fear, basically.”

The iPads were less intim­i­dat­ing and more afford­able than lap­top com­put­ers, Voss said, mak­ing them ideal for class­room use. The soft­ware can also be updated on all the iPads at once.

The pri­mary school wasn’t the only Galion school build­ing to get the new tech­nol­ogy. Dozens were pur­chased and divvied up among the build­ings: The high school got 26, the mid­dle school 66, and the inter­me­di­ate school received 29. Eight more were reserved for district-wide use.

The iPads were pur­chased this sum­mer using $78,440 of grant funds received under the Amer­i­can Recov­ery and Rein­vest­ment Act, accord­ing to school trea­surer Linda Kid­well. The grants were ear­marked for spe­cial edu­ca­tion and mid­dle school tech­nol­ogy. Some of that fund­ing also cov­ered get­ting the iPads engraved, pur­chas­ing iPad cov­ers, and pur­chas­ing charg­ing carts for the iPads. The charg­ing carts allow up to 30 iPads to be stored, charged and transported.

A panel of teach­ers helped exper­i­ment with var­i­ous iPad apps and picked which ones would be installed on the district’s iPads. Most of the apps cho­sen were free. All the iPads from the pri­mary school on up to the high school are cur­rently loaded with the same apps, Voss said, but in the future she hopes to be able to cus­tomize her building’s iPad apps since young chil­dren have dif­fer­ent needs from those of mid­dle– or high-schoolers.

The cart at the pri­mary school made the rounds towed by teams of teach­ers who had attended spe­cial iPad train­ing ses­sions out­side the dis­trict. They intro­duced the iPads to the stu­dents and helped the teach­ers get used to using the technology.

Now that stu­dents and teach­ers have been exposed to the iPads, the next step is to fig­ure out how to use them to sup­port instruc­tion, Voss said. Cur­rently many of the apps are games designed to rein­force the sight words or math facts that chil­dren have been taught. Some second-grade teach­ers at GPS have devel­oped a vocab­u­lary app, Voss said, but more work lies ahead to fully inte­grate iPads into class­room instruction.

Posted by Sarah Einselen on Jan 31 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.