Technology in education: student engagement through iPods

I love talking to people of a certain age who have never taught in a classroom. The conversation usually starts with a line like this: “Do you teach high school? I don’t know how you do it!” Once that fact is established, my conversation partner usually wanders through all the ills that have befallen our public schools in the last decade, muttering my own opinions about my profession from time to time (which is usually countered with a ” Well, in my time…” farewell). We came to the end of our chat with my new acquaintance sighing and then summing up the big issues facing teens today by saying something like “Kids just aren’t the same these days.”

While I smile politely through most of the conversation, I secretly (or not so secretly) disagree with many statements, I tend to agree with the final statement: Kids just ARE NOT the same these days. It’s almost dizzying to think about how much our world has changed in the last decade (use the size of a cell phone as a yardstick if you must). How can we expect our youth to remain the same? His is a world of texting, tweeting, Google and Facebook, and none of these things were common knowledge (much less common verbs!) when he was in high school, even though that was only ten years ago. Instead of lamenting that today’s students are not responding to the standard method of delivering instruction, we should be meeting them on their own playing field, integrating technology into our daily practice. With this thought in mind, I structured my class around the use of iPods and quickly learned that dedicated educators have the opportunity to harness so much educational potential through one small device.

I became the shepherdess of thirty iPod Touches as a kind of fluke; I was a young English teacher, and my school district had just received a grant to put these devices in English, math, and science classes that were preparing for our state’s standardized tests. The car resembled R2-D2 from Star Wars, and had a slot for each numbered iPod that came complete with a cable connecting it to the cart itself; this allowed for bulk charging and syncing of iPods. Inside the cart, I found that it was also equipped with a Macbook, a digital presenter, and a wireless access point.

Instead of the excitement that I’m sure I must have felt (oh, the right to be one of the first teachers in the district to be a part of this new wave in education!), I was completely scared. Nothing in my limited teaching experience thus far, not to mention my college education courses, had prepared me to handle or use iPods with my students. What the hell was he supposed to do with these things? Weren’t they just for listening to music and playing the odd game? What was he supposed to do if a student left with one? In fact, what was stopping them from coming in after hours and taking the whole car out? I was plagued by thoughts of massive educational failure, followed by the inevitable termination of my teaching position, and I considered myself very unfortunate to have been chosen for such an “honor.”

I eventually got over my terror and created a system where each student was assigned an iPod for their seat in the classroom. Students and parents signed a waiver at the beginning of the school year acknowledging that they would be responsible for half the cost of the iPod if theirs was lost or damaged beyond normal wear and tear. Each desk was equipped with an iPod “parking space”, which was simply a sheet of laminated paper in the outline of an iPod that included the iPod number assigned to that desk and the rules for using iPods; when the iPods were not in use, students were required to put them face down in their parking space. Students were to pick up their assigned iPods from the cart when they first entered the classroom and return them during clean-up time, approximately three minutes before the bell rang. Because I was teaching five separate sections of tenth and eleventh grade students throughout the day, this system made it easy to manage the devices and also prevented students from simply playing with their iPods when instruction was taking place.

My first foray into using iPods was very simple, but it eventually turned into an effective research project. Simply using the Safari app, I had students look up various facts about our upcoming author and answer questions on a worksheet. This first project turned out to be too basic (and too much like looking up data in a textbook), so we added another element to our next project. When we began our unit on Zora Neale Hurston, I created a modified web search by simply searching for informational websites and saving the links to my PortaPortal website. I then created a shortcut on the iPods to my PortaPortal site. Students were placed in groups and given the job of creating “Farcebook” profile pages that were to include posts, biographical information, and friends that would have been included if Zora Neale Hurston had had a social networking site like Facebook. Different variations of this project became a regular event in my classroom because my students felt they weren’t doing “real research” due to the format of the final product, and were much more willing to find the information using the iPods than they were. . it had been while doing a similar project using print materials.

After that initial success, I started looking into more specialized apps. I soon discovered that some simple (and free!) games on the App Store could be used as quick and efficient bells (or warm-ups). Right before our standardized tests, my remedial students started using Miss Spell’s Class for the first five minutes of class every other day to go over commonly misspelled words. Students would record their scores on index cards that I would collect for participation credit at the end of class. We also used to start class with Chicktionary, a game that requires letters to be rearranged to spell different words; I would ask students to write down a word from their game that they are unfamiliar with and then use their dictionary app to find the definition. Depending on the amount of time we had in class, I could extend this activity so that students have to use that word in a sentence or ask a partner about the meaning of the word. We also made use of the Grammar Up app as a way to review concepts before an assessment.

For my more advanced students, I started a class blog that allowed us to create “silent discussions” where students could use their iPods to answer discussion questions. I would post a question on the site before class started, and students would respond in class by commenting on the post and then responding to their classmates’ posts. I shaped this activity in several different ways, including having students use certain sentence structures in their comments (i.e. you must use a compound sentence in your post) and also having them post their own questions for the class to discuss “in silence”. This activity became a favorite with my students because it allowed quiet students (who didn’t talk at all in regular discussions but often had wonderful ideas) to express themselves, and it was also fun to see how long a twenty-minute class lasted. students. five tenth graders could sit in a room together and verbally shut up while interacting with each other on their devices.

I also used the iPods as an easy way to differentiate the instruction. My eleventh grade remedial class had students who received special education assistance, as well as students who were just below target in the regular level course. Because of this wide range of skill levels, behavior management was often difficult to deal with, as students became bored because the instruction was too slow for them, or began acting like a mask for not grasping concepts as quickly as possible. others. By placing an audio copy of the books we read in class on each iPod and creating reading guides that highlighted the concepts we had discussed in class, students were able to work at their own pace while I circulated the room and provided help to the students. people. . The reading guides eventually became something of an Easter egg hunt, with questions like “After reading Chapter 2, go back to page 5 and copy the personification example used there.”

In addition to the techniques I’ve described in detail above, I’ve implemented iPods in many other ways. Google Docs helped me create simple multiple-choice (and even short-answer) tests that could be completed on iPods; these gave me a snapshot of how students were doing with the concepts we were discussing in class. iBooks’ PDF feature allowed me to upload copies of my PowerPoint presentations so students who were absent could quickly come in and copy notes. The preloaded camera app allowed my students to take photos and videos of group projects. The QR code reader allowed me to create scavenger hunts where students would scan the codes, submit them to sites or videos, and answer questions for a project. The best part was that I was only at the tip of the iceberg; I can’t even begin to imagine what these devices could do in other disciplines and grade levels.

Now, with all of that said, I’m not saying the iPod Touch is the last word in student engagement; in fact, by the time this article is read, this piece of technology may be completely out of date. iPads, Android devices, and other devices have the same potential; I just talked about my work with the technology that was made available to me. The point to be drawn from my experience is that as educators we also need to be innovative; we cannot stick to the same strategies in the classroom and expect engagement to come naturally. The classroom must transform and change with the rest of the world.

If a reader is looking for a place to get started with technology in the classroom, I hope this article has provided some helpful tips, as well as some inspiration. However, I am also hopeful that this article will quickly become outdated as teachers continue to develop new approaches. Using the means that students are already comfortable with to engage those young minds in important classroom work makes sense.