Magical Lessons

Nick de Souza

It's 2010. A crowd of inner city school teachers have gathered inside the principal's office. On his desk sits what seems like a giant iPhone to some, a silly device without a physical keyboard to others. To me—someone who had watched Steve Jobs's iPad unveiling a few weeks before—it looks exactly what Steve called it: a magical thing.
Flash forward to the year 2013, and a number of teachers still remain to be convinced. Who could blame them, when many a "new new thing" has appeared like a godsend yet served only to lengthen teachers' workloads, adding nothing to sound pedagogy? Look at email. It's a technology that's supposed to save us time, and yet, it's effectively tied us to our desks for longer each day. Thankfully, the head of learning technologies at my school is an iPad convert. Earlier this year, he ordered 100 iPad minis, still far too few for each student to have one each, but as much as our beleaguered budget would allow in these austerity-ridden times, when UK government cuts are really starting to bite. To encourage take up, we ran a training session where we faced some famil [...]
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