I got the comment below on the About page, but thought it merited a post; I was going to address this at some point anyway, so figured I’d do it now:
“How do you prevent students from playing games? We deployed iPads to al students grades 9-12. A few teachers are having difficulties keeping students from this.”
This is a common question / problem. The difficult part is that the answer probably won’t be satisfying. The iPads are a paradigm shift, and that means that teachers have to redefine some of their approaches / philosophies, both in terms of planning classes and in terms of classroom management.
First, the technical side. There is of course LanSchool, the application that allows teachers to monitor student computer use. I don’t know a ton about LanSchool, but my understanding is that it was designed for laptop use, and has now expanded to limited iPad use; teachers can use an iPad to monitor student computer use, and can monitor some apps on student iPads. Beyond LanSchool, I know of no other way to monitor student iPad use other than simply walking around the classroom. I imagine, though, that monitoring iPads more carefully must be on LanSchool’s to do list.
Now for the philosophical side. Your teachers likely won’t appreciate this, but here’s what I say: don’t demonize the device. It’s not the iPad’s fault that students are distracted. If they didn’t have iPads, they’d likely be doodling, or staring out the window, or talking to friends, or any other number of ways to distract themselves. The iPad might make the distraction more fun but it doesn’t create the need for distraction; that is endemic to the student and/or the class itself (perhaps difficult to hear but true). On the other hand, as distractions go, the iPad is helpful. If a student is going to be distracted one way or another (and that’s an assumption I’m making for certain students), the iPad in my experience is a considerably less distracting distraction, i.e. it holds their attention and doesn’t involve other students.If a student is going to be distracted, he/she shouldn’t take others down with him.
Classes also need to be planned differently: they either incorporate the iPad or they don’t. If they don’t, the teacher is well within his/her rights to have iPads away. If the lesson incorporates the iPads, then they obviously should be hands on and developed such that the iPad is being used. More problematic, of course, is the incidental / everyday use of the iPad. Many of my students use it to take notes (some even use their iPhone), an approach I wholeheartedly endorse. But it means that iPads are / can be out when they’re not explicitly being used, which leads to a greater potential for abuse. But, I wouldn’t want to punish those that are using the iPad appropriately.
To sum up, it might just be one of those problems that the teacher has to accept as part of having the iPads, but for me it’s not an awful problem (because it’s a relatively focused and individual distraction) and it’s not a new problem (because students were distracted before the iPad and will be distracted after the iPad).
Love to hear what people think. This is a thorny issue to say the least.
Wayland High School's One-to-One iPad Pilot 
Jun 05, 2012 @ 13:22:22
When a student is distracted and doodling on a paper, they can still retain some of the lecture. When a student is distracted by an iPad, they’re in their own virtual reality and retain about nothing, especially if they’re playing a game. The iPad can distract other students around, if you see someone playing a game… you may tend to watch them and then if you don’t know about the game, you may ask a question and wonder what game it is.
Jun 08, 2012 @ 06:46:29
(Apologies for the delay in responding; I’ve been wrapping up standardized testing season and my senior grades.) Thanks for commenting, Jake. On the one hand, I agree: there are different gradations in distractions, and something mindless like doodling might be just enough to actually provide focus rather than distraction. On the other hand, I would ask where is that line drawn? Where’s the line between mindless and mind-ful (for lack of a better term)? And isn’t that line going to be different for each student? In addition to which, there are plenty of mindless distractions on the iPad commensurate with doodling; the iPad doesn’t automatically provide in-depth, engrossing distraction. In terms of other students, well, that becomes a different story.
My one rule / principle is this: whatever you do, don’t get in the way of other students’ learning, so if something (whether an iPad or something more innocuous like chatting or doodling) becomes a distraction to others, it gets shut down, whatever it is.
The real question, though, is much broader (and ultimately personal, which is why it’s such a difficult issue), and it has to do with students’ behavior as an implicit comment on our teaching / classes. If a student is able to spend classtime distracted on an iPad (or by anything else, for that matter), I blame myself and my class rather than the student. What am I doing or not doing that the student doesn’t need to be engaged to be successful? (And let me be very clear that there are plenty of classes of mine that fall into this category; in no way am I saying that my classes are so engaging that students aren’t distracted.)
If I can analogize, it always makes me chuckle when I look around the room at faculty meetings: teachers are grading, chatting, texting, doodling, etc. And then these very same teachers go to their classes and discipline students for doing the exact same things (how great would it be for a principal to walk around a faculty meeting and confiscate faculty cell phones as they text?). I don’t fault the facutly for this necessarily, but they are making the same judgments that are students make: time is valuable and I want to make sure I’m not wasting it. If faculty see a meeting as a waste of time, they’ll do something else. Why do we not let students communicate the same message?
The answer of course is ego. Teachers don’t want that implicit judgment about material to which they’re committed and classes which they’ve worked hard to plan. But ultimately if we as teachers can’t take criticism, whether implicit via student behavior or explicit via evaluations, how are we supposed to become better teachers? And this is why I love the challenge of the iPads. How can I not only use them to better my teaching but also to use them as a gauge for myself of how engaging and interesting my classes are. The less students are fixated on those screens, the better I’m doing.
Long time no post… | Washington School 1:1 iPads
Mar 07, 2014 @ 11:42:14
iPad in the classroom: aid, distraction or disaster?
Jul 31, 2014 @ 05:41:41