Last year, another teacher and I applied to have a set of 30 ipads come to our school for 1 month. As the sponsor teachers, we were responsible for creating sign out schedules and teaching our colleagues how to use the ipads. After we received the ipad cart, teachers were excited and the sign-up sheets were filling up quickly. But, with very low bandwidth, teachers stopped using the ipads because they couldn’t access information on the web. I took one of the ipads home and started playing around with a variety of the preinstalled apps. It was a lot of fun, but it consumed a lot of my time.
In my classroom, I was very surprised in the increased level of engagement when I just gave the ipads to my students and had them play. Students were responsible for coming with something interesting that they found while playing with the ipads. Students were able to share their findings with the rest of the class by connecting the ipad to the digital projector in my classroom. Although the students came up with some interesting and fun apps to play with, “Doodlecast” really caught my attention. In the next session, I had the students, in pairs, play around and learn how to use doodle cast. Students then had the opportunity to connect their ipad to the projector and share their ideas with the class. This turned into a great learning session for me and my students. The most powerful thing I saw come out of my students was the Peer to Peer teaching. Through this process, I was learning the difference between using technology and integrating technology (Dunn, 2013). This is where I started to understand a phrase my school administrator mentioned to me; “We need to stop being the sage on the stage and start being the guide on the side”.