A pilot program at Jane E. Tuitt Elementary School on St. Thomas is giving students some creative learning time on brand new iPads. The tablets are being used to supplement daily reading and math lessons.
The iPads have been used in one second-grade and two first-grade classrooms at the school for about the past three weeks and, already, the students have mastered how to use them.
“The purpose of this program is to get the students involved with technology that can help them enhance what’s being taught in the classrooms,” said St. Thomas-St. John Superintendent Jeanette Smith-Barry during a recent interview at the school.
“The iPad is a tool that the teachers have already been using in the schools with great results and we wanted to continue to see the students being captivated and excited about what they are learning on them,” she said.
Smith-Barry said first-graders in the pilot program will be able to take the iPads with them when they move onto second grade, while the second-graders will also be able to use them when they move on to third grade. The district then hopes to find funding for another set of equipment that will be put back into the classrooms once those students move onto fourth grade at Leonard Dober Elementary, she said.
Smith-Barry said that Tuitt was a good site for the pilot program because it is a small school that has been trying to make local adequate yearly progress standards (AYP) for years.
“They finally made AYP in 2012 after several years of trying, and we wanted to do what we could to help repeat that trend,” she said. “So we are working with a small population here but, eventually, we hope that this is something we could be able to put in more schools around the district.”
Debra Sharpe, a second-grade teacher at Tuitt, said her students are able to use the iPads to complete their math journals and to do video reading summaries that map out the plots, characters and highlights of the books they are reading for class.
“I read about Rosa Parks and how she fought against sitting at the back of the bus,” second-grader Gabriel Robinson said on camera as Smith-Barry and Tuitt Principal Carolyn Archer moved through Sharpe’s classroom during a recent visit.
Other students moved in closer to hear Robinson’s summary while she filmed and also began discussing their own opinions of the book.
“It has been great to see the students so excited about coming to school,” Archer said later. “In these pilot classrooms, the students have been able to work individually on the iPads for their projects and they also get some free time on them during the day when they have completed their classwork and we what we’ve seen is that they are so engaged in what they are doing.”
“Now, by following these particular classes, we will also be able to see, as they move on to the next grade, whether the iPad has made a difference or not,” Archer said.
