Learning in a new language
One of the students in Rang Fergal plugs an iPad into a projector alongside it and a video frame appears on the screen. A news bulletin produced by a group of students starts running, opening with a humorous introduction by one girl.
She sets the scene by giving the headlines, a topic covered the previous term when students learned about how news is made and the necessary ingredients.
The fun and drama continue as the student on screen reads the news script: “Miss Havisham was today looking forward to spending the rest of her life with the love of her life, Compeyson.”
The video then moves to a comical re-enactment of a wedding which is cut short, a key episode in the novel Great Expectations, which the class has been studying.
Mr Burke asks the class about the significance of the scene chosen by the group to act out for their news report. In response, a number of students tell him it is the fact that Miss Havisham has been stood up at her wedding.
“Yes, and everything that happens in the book as a consequence of that. Because if she hadn’t been stood up, she wouldn’t have been a crazy old lady living on her own, or wouldn’t have called Pip to her house and he wouldn’t have met Estella,” he reminds students.
The second video shown to the class features a TV ad for a break in the news, made by another group. This prompts a brief recap exercise about some of the elements needed in advertising, which they also covered in classes earlier in the year.
All the filming was done on the iPads, which every student in the class has had as part of a pilot project here at Coláiste Choilm in Ballincollig, Co Cork, since last September.
As they go back to their Dickens novel, there is no paper on their desks. Instead, they click Great Expectations in a folder on each of their iPads and call up the text, with a larger version displayed on the whiteboard, now connected to the teacher’s iPad.
Reading through the text, which Mr Burke says is quite a hard one for students in first year, there are plenty of words that might pose a difficulty.
But this is where one of the students’ favourite aspects of the ebook experience comes into play. By pointing the computer cursor at a word and double-clicking on it, a number of options come up, including “define”.
By simply choosing this, they can find out what an imposter is, but not before a discussion on what they think it might be. Then, just by clicking on the word, a dictionary definition appears on the screen.
“One of the best things is that you’ve got all your calculators and dictionaries and internet translating, all on the iPad, so you don’t have to go out and buy them all,” says one girl.
Or, says Tiana O’Brien, they can contact each other to discuss a joint project without using their phones.
“There’s an app called FaceTime for video messaging, it’s like Skype,” she explains.
The school has a number of wireless broadband routers but after initial teething problems with so many iPads in one room, a dedicated wifi hub was installed in Rang Fergal’s base classroom.
Much of their homework can also be done with the aid of their iPads, even doing away with the age-old excuse of not knowing what assignments they had been given.
“If you’re not in school, because maybe you were at a match, you can send an email to the whole class and someone will tell you about your homework,” says one diligent student.
The second class on this Thursday morning was Irish with teacher Aileen Hennessy, who called up a number of students to deliver presentations they had worked on at home.
For most first-year classes, an exercise like this might involve a boy or girl standing up at their desk and reading from a copybook, but things are much different in Rang Fergal.
First up is Liam Weafer, who brings his iPad to the top of the class and hooks it up to the data projector. The assignment on his iPad screen pops up on the whiteboard for everyone to see, as he reads an account in Irish about himself, his family, his house, and school.
Not only do his classmates get to hear and read about his home, they can even see some of the rooms in the digital photos he has taken with the iPad and inserted into the presentation.
“They learn great multimedia skills, they get to use photography, video and audio tools putting all these presentations together for different subjects,” says Ian Mulcahy, who is co-ordinating the pilot project at Coláiste Choilm.
And for the teachers, too, it makes the students a lot more engaged.
“It really bridges the gap between the classroom and their lives outside school, because they nearly all have iPads or similar kinds of technology already,” says Ms Hennessy.
“It particularly helps teaching Irish, which might traditionally be considered boring, when they have instant access to the internet to look up words in class or as part of their homework.
“There aren’t a whole lot of websites with material appropriate for first-year standards of Irish, but there are some very good apps available.”
Another fun element for students is that they get to show off their technological expertise, not just to their classmates, but very often also to the teachers. In some subjects, homework will sometimes involve going off and finding new iPad apps that might be useful and sharing them in the next class.
Who said homework couldn’t be fun?
THE changes planned in how the three-year junior cycle at second level is taught and delivered will see the use of technology play a key role. The interactive nature of classes with iPads and ebooks also kicks traditional “chalk and talk” teaching methods firmly into history — for this Co Cork class at least.
This is something to be welcomed in light of research by the ESRI for the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, which has said the over-reliance on textbooks and memorising for exams is one of the biggest weaknesses of the current system.
The redesigned junior cycle that Ruairi Quinn, the education minister, wants all second-level students to use, beginning with the first-year class of Sept 2014, will require far greater use of techniques that require students to find information themselves instead of depending on their teachers to tell them.
Coláiste Choilm principal Michelle Sliney says the school is already looking at extending the pilot scheme of teaching with iPads, perhaps to two of next autumn’s first-year classes, given the clear success with the students to date.
“There’s no doubt that it’s the future. But we also have to balance our plans with the infrastructure requirements in the school,” says Ms Sliney.
“It’s not just the future of general education, but there’s also digital literacy they’re gaining, and there’s huge potential for using that in the new junior cycle programme.
“But the core skills of education are still being developed at the same time. They will be doing their exams in the same fashion as the other students, but they just have this extra dimension of having the technology in class, a large part being the skills they learn to go and find solutions themselves and self-directed learning.”
The students of Rang Fergal at Coláiste Choilm in Ballincollig have been using their iPads and ebooks in eight core subjects, while using traditional books in science and their optional subjects, in which they are mixed in with students from some of the other first-year classes.
The range of ebooks available to schools is on the rise each year. With pressure on parents to meet the costs of lengthening book lists, one advantage is that publishers charge up to 35% less, depending on the number of ebooks being used in a school. And parents aren’t the only ones happy with the deal.
“My brother and sister love playing games on the iPad, but they’re made give it back to me if I say I have homework to do on it,” says Rang Fergal pupil Shane Quigley.
It’s also very useful for hobbies, says Jordan Morrissey, who has found some very useful apps to help his songwriting skills.
Coláiste Choilm uses ebooks from the Educational Company of Ireland, Edco, which has had a team of designers working on them since 2005. It now has 30 second-level schools signed up for its ebooks, and about 4,000 students using the system.
The company currently offers around 80 interactive ebooks for Junior and Leaving Certificate, and more than 8,000 resources such as science experiment videos, language podcasts, and maths solutions, all created by the publisher’s authors.
Features of ebooks that are like the traditional printed versions include the ability to add notes to pages, or highlight text. But an advantage is that they can be just as easily undone or erased if a student wants to do so.
IAN Mulcahy, an English teacher and co-ordinator of the iPad programme at Coláiste Choilm, says it is far more engaging for students if they can do an activity on their electronic devices that could not otherwise be done without expensive equipment or taking up a lot of class time.
“The teacher sets the topics, and they can go away and research online,” he says.
“In German, if they’re learning new vocabulary, they can take pictures with the iPad of things around the house. It could be food or furniture, and then they put together a presentation using the German words they are learning. It’s a lot more interesting than just learning off new words, straight out of a book.”
He said the response has been overwhelmingly positive from students and teachers, and he heard largely positive feedback at a recent parent-teacher meeting for first years.
Through Cork IT suppliers Stream Solutions, the school got a deal which involved parents paying €515 for each iPad and a protective case, and the school has paid the cost of the ebooks for the pilot year of the programme.
“It’s great training in digital literacy and for the world of work as well. You can also do a lot more group work in classes,” says Mr Mulcahy.
But, he stresses, the focus on digital learning does not detract from the important work of developing young pupils’ literacy and numeracy skills.
“There is any number of apps with games all about adding and subtracting, and other basic maths,” says Mr Mulcahy. “Or for literacy, there are vocabulary-building exercises, and dictionaries and thesauruses for languages, so these things are all linked with digital literacy really. And although their bags are an awful lot lighter, they still have copybooks, too.”
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