Technology has had a positive effect on student learning in Community Unit School District 95.
Three teachers came before the District 95 School Board of Education on March 19 to talk about how the district’s 1:1 Mobile Learning Initiative, where all middle and high school students have access to their own district-owned iPad, has affected the way they teach and students learn.
Each heaped praise upon the program for different reasons.
Lake Zurich High School social studies teacher Laura Fonte said that it’s made communication between students and teachers better.
“When the students email us ‘I’m going to be absent tomorrow, I’m not feeling well,’ we can simply say to them ‘Up on Canvas tomorrow, in this tab, you will see this assignment. Download it when you feel up to it, send it to us,'” Fonte said.
Canvas is the district’s learning management system. It allows teachers to upload course content and lets students easily access it.
“They’re able to access it anywhere,” Forte said. “If, for some reason, their iPad isn’t working, they can go to their desktops, their phones — they can go and download anything, anywhere from Canvas.”
LZHS Spanish teacher Jennifer LaBrie noted that Canvas made it easier for foreign language teachers to assess students on their speaking, reading, writing and listening skills and offer timely feedback on their work.
For example, LaBrie said that activities she once had to put on a projector for the classroom could now be uploaded in the form of a podcast or a video on Canvas for students to navigate at their own pace.
And where it previously took more time for teachers to grade papers and return them to students with their feedback, they could now provide it quicker through Canvas.
“You can see, as soon as they click the ‘submit’ button, they can see what [they got wrong] immediately,” LaBrie told the board, showing them an example.
Should the students have questions about the teacher’s feedback, they can message them through Canvas, which LaBrie has noticed is less intimidating for students.
In the reflections she had students type in Canvas about the mistakes they made in their assessments, LaBrie noticed students were writing more than they had when they wrote them out. She thought it had something to do with students preferring a keyboard over a pencil and paper.
Canvas’ timely feedback has also allowed teachers to more quickly assess which students are stronger in certain areas than others, and subsequently place them in flexible groups in class.
“We put some strong students in with groups of students that might be struggling to kind of help pull those students up and provide the students that are doing well with some leadership qualities,” Fonte said.
LZHS special education teacher Joanne Biondi said that giving students access to iPads, in general, enhanced the teaching and learning experience.
For example, if students ever have a question that the teacher cannot immediately answer, they can look it up.
“Just yesterday, we were talking about eclipses — when’s the next one? We had it up and in, like, 30 seconds. April 4th,” Biondi said, referring to the lunar eclipse that will be viewable throughout most of North America on Saturday. “So that kind of on-the-spot, real-life learning has truly been terrific and really very engaging for the kids.”
In 2013, the district adopted an expanded instructional technology plan that aimed to achieve a student-to-computer ratio of one-to-one at the middle and high school levels over the course of three years, as well as enhance the use of technology at the elementary school level.
The district began rolling out its initiative at the beginning of the 2013-14 school year, and aims to finish distributing iPads to the remainder of middle and high school students in the 2015-16 school year.
Laura Pavin is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
