Students, Faculty Reflect on iPad Relevance

This academic year, the Administration required all students to purchase iPads or tablet PCs with the intent to improve classroom productivity and incorporate technology into the Harkness pedagogy. While the prerequisite provided classes with a new resource for the school year, faculty and students have responded with mixed sentiments.In previous years, faculty members engaged in discussion of this integration and a three-year pilot program to determine whether or not tablets would enhance the Academy’s curriculum. Although faculty members did not agree unanimously, the Curriculum Committee endorsed the requirement for this academic year.Due to the numerous math-related applications available for tablets, the math department in particular has utilized iPads more than the other academic departments. From Desmos to GeoGebra, math instructors have largely agreed that the iPads have improved classroom dynamics.Math instructor Thomas Seidenberg said that with iPads, graphing is now far less time consuming than it used to be. He noted that iPads allow students to more effectively picture functions, a helpful means of learning the nature of these skills in higher-level mathematics courses.“We are [now] able to quickly check a fact, graph a function, do a construction, quickly,” Seidenberg said. “A student in my 431 class made a very cool interactive construction for a circle of curvature problem on Desmos. The construction helped others visualize what was being asked in the problem.”Seidenberg added that since all students own iPads, whereas in the past only some students possessed tablets, classroom experience became more uniform and active.Other students and faculty criticized and questioned the decision to require iPads, and many noted the fact that the Curriculum Committee did not consider a single faculty or student vote. Many also viewed tablets as both unnecessary for classroom learning and excessively expensive.Students noted that only few classes made a good use of tablets, and that computers and laptops provide similar applications that the iPads offer. Some even felt that iPads negatively impact students’ focus during Harkness discussions.“Currently, I am only using the iPad as a kindle reader for a single class,” lower Evan Xiang said.“Desmos is a good application for math, but you can use it on the computer as well so there is not much improvement. Most of the teachers do not even have a clear policy about iPad usage. Even worse, there is definitely a greater chance for students to be distracted by social media apps on the iPad.”One asset of owning a tablet, the Curriculum Committee argued, is that purchasing textbooks as e-books is more cost efficient than purchasing hard copies. Many, however, disagreed with this statement. “The tablet helped maybe save me the $30 I would have spent on my music theory textbook this term,” senior Jonathan Regenold said. “But that does not even come close to comparing to the price of the iPad.”Lower Brian Choi echoed Regenold’s sentiments and emphasized that the price of iPads further burden students financially, when all students purchase expensive textbooks in the Academy’s bookstore. “We were required to buy iPads worth around $400-$500, yet my friends and I still had to pay around the same amount for textbooks from the bookstore,” Choi said.Faculty members of the English and history departments said they would have liked PEA to take another route toward incorporating iPads into the curriculum. “The decision to require iPads was not presented clearly nor persuasively to parents or students or faculty,” English instructor Brooks Moriarty said.“It would have been better for the school to purchase more classroom sets so that students and teachers could explore the educational value of iPads together more thoroughly.”History instructor Erik Wade also disagreed with the premise of requiring iPads. “We didn’t frequently use the allotment of iPads provided us and speaking with a variety of students, tablets didn’t seem necessary in most, if not, all their classes,” he said.As students noted, many faculty also found online versions of textbooks to be ineffective and impractical. “E-books are really still pretty awkward to use in class, to get back and forth between pages and it’s harder to write notations in the margins, so I do not like to use them,” English instructor Barbara Desmond said. “Many of my students look things up on their tablets and that is fine, but I do not use it as part of my teaching.”However, faculty members said that instead of evaluating iPads’ practicality in classes, they felt obligated to implement tablets into their courses.“This is a big expense, and my use of tablets in the classroom is more about honoring the financial commitment of families than the educational value of tablets,” Moriarty said. “I hope to discover the educational value of iPads over time, so I will keep an open mind. But the cart is way ahead of the horse right now.”Wade added that the decision showed a lack of independent thinking. He emphasized that the Academy seems to be following the lead of peer institutions in the trend of incorporating technology to school curriculums.“My initial thought is that this decision was a reactive one as opposed to considering how we, as a school, could respond in a novel way to the interest of countless schools and universities around the nation who’ve incorporated these tablets,” Wade said. “It bothers me that we followed the crowd as opposed to created a new trend.”