Some Middletown area schools districts are working to find ways to incorporate electronic tablets and digital textbooks into classes in a cost effective way, including creating Bring Your Own Device policies.
Thanks to a grant from the Middletown Community Foundation, Monroe High School has iPads to use in a science class. Monroe Schools’ special needs program has also obtained several iPads for its digital learning program through an MCF grant.
A Bring Your Own Device policy at Monroe Schools would allow students to download educational information onto their personal smartphones, iPads or laptops, according to David Hogan, Monroe’s library media specialist and the head of the district’s technology committee. The district, he said, is in the initial phase of considering such a policy.
“It’s going to be a fairly long process to get everything in place to do that,” Hogan said. “There’s so much that we have to ensure. We have to make sure that the policy is safe and that everything involved goes through our filters, and not the student’s 4G networks. There has to be a policy in place in order to make that work.”
Middletown City Schools has “more than 1,000” iPads already. Rather than adopt a BYOD policy similar to Monroe’s, Middletown has students download their digital textbooks onto the school’s iPad or Nook devices. Students can then take the device home with all the information they need for a course.
Because some students may not have computers or Internet access at home, it’s very important any such policy isn’t “creating situations of inequity with access to curriculum,” said Robin Surland, Middletown City Schools’ Senior Director of Technology and Innovation.
“It doesn’t mean that you can’t do digital textbooks, it just means that you have to think about it differently,” she said. “For example, we do have a pilot program going on with a science class that is using iPads, not so much as a digital textbook but as a learning tool, and that has been the first set of technology that was sent home with the students.”
Middletown will announce the winner of an in-house grant next week. One elementary school will earn Nook devices for an entire grade level, according to Surland.
“The students will bring the device to school, content is downloaded onto it, they take the device home and then they have a whole library of books and things at their fingertips. And they’re motivated to bring it back to school to get new books downloaded onto the device,” she said.
Currently, Fenwick High School’s advanced placement English class uses Kindles. Each student in the class is issued a Kindle and any novel assigned in class is downloaded onto it, according to Robin Blank, Fenwick’s Marketing and Communications Coordinator.
“Many other classes utilize digital instruction through the use of iPads and laptops, but the AP English class is the only one that is completely taught with a digital book,” Blank said.
An Ohio Digital Learning Task Force has been created for the purpose of looking at the current and future state of digital learning.
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