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Your weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs.
Special Episode:
We replay parts 1, 2 and 3 of iPad High School from a time when iPads were starting to be widely used in a Central Indiana High school
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WADE WINGLER: This is Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals crossroads in Indiana with your Assistance Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up-to-date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs.
Welcome to episode number 290 of Assistance Technology Update. It’s scheduled to be released on December 16, 2016.
Before we get started with the show, I need to jump in and let you know that we are doing something different. These shows are being released in December 2016 when we are sort of taking time off for the holidays and resting and relaxing a little bit. I decided, instead of doing new shows during this period of time, we were going to go back to one of our favorite series that was done about five years ago called iPad High School. This was early in the days of assistive technology update. We visited Danville Indiana High School which is one of the local high schools where my daughter at the time was going to high school. They decided to go digital. They were one of the first schools in Indiana to totally go paperless and do iPads for everything. For three weeks in a row we are going to do iPad High School Part One, iPad High School Part Two which was originally recorded in 2011, and then we are going to do iPad High School Follow-up which was recorded a year later to see how the implementation went.
I hope that you enjoy this nostalgic look back at how the iPad impacted the central Indiana high school, my family, my daughter, my grandparents and walk down memory lane with us. After the first of the year, we will be back with our regular format of news and interviews and all those other kinds of things.
In the meantime, I would love to do sort of an iPad impact episode sometime early in 2017. Here’s what I need you to do. I need you to call our listener line and let us know how the iPad has impacted your assistance technology life in the last five years. You can do that by calling our listener line at 317-721-7124. Let us know how the iPad has been a big deal or not with you and assistive technology. If we get enough of those comments together, we will put together a whole episode as a follow up on this iPad high school we visited. Without further delay, here we go with walking down memory lane in our episodes of iPad High School.
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KATIE: Hi, I’m Katie, and this is my iPad, and this is your Assistance Technology Update.
WADE WINGLER: Hi, this is Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals crossroads in Indiana with your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up-to-date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs.
This week and next week we are breaking from our regular format on Assistive Technology Update to bring you a story that is pretty interesting, I think. I recently learned that my daughter’s high school in Danville, Indiana, has taken the bold step of replacing all of their textbooks with iPads. There is some argument about whether or not they are the first school to do that and the state of Indiana, but they are certainly among the first in what seems to be one of many schools were trying to replace those traditional heavy, mostly inaccessible textbooks with iPads and tablet PCs and devices that are going to make life different if not better for a lot of folks.
Instead of news and interviews and questions and answers we usually do, we are going to spend our time this week and next week talking about the implications of this. We are going to talk a little bit of time talking to my daughter from the student’s perspective. We’re going to spend time talking with other members of the community including grandparents, the special ed director. We also spent some time with the school staff who are behind the implementation, the purchasing, and making those tough decisions about what happens when they are stolen or broken or when kids misused those devices.
I’m excited about this episode and I hope you are too. We are going to spend time talking about what we call iPad High School.
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Like many good stories, this one starts with a rumor. This rumor was, hey, dad, I think we are getting iPads at school next year and they’re getting rid of the textbooks. Of course I didn’t want to take stock and that because my kid, like many kids, have had a lot of rumors come across their house right up to the fact that an amusement park is moving in next door and there’s going to be free roller coaster rides. As you can imagine, there was a lot of talk around the grocery store and school meetings and events and ballgames and things like that. The rumor started circulating and growing and it became obvious after a while that a lot of kids were talking about this. Before long there was a letter from the school that said, in fact, Danville community high school was going to be rolling out iPads to all students in the high school ninth, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade.
Of course that started lots of questions bubbling around my head and the heads of other parents, things like wow, who’s going to pay for this and what’s it going to cost. What’s going to happen if it breaks? What is my kid try to look up naughty things on the iPad? How do we deal with that? Are they going to be installing apps and playing Angry Birds all the time? I do happen to have a new, cool Apple Bluetooth keyboard here. I wonder if you could use that or print. There’s lots of questions. Of course being someone who is an assistive technology professional, I started thinking that really does mean some interesting things for kids with disabilities. After all, iPads talk and I have magnification built in and there is all kinds of apps to help kids with disabilities.
All these thoughts started bubbling around. Before long, we learned that there was a parent meeting where parents would have an opportunity to get together with the administered of staff at the school to talk about what’s happening with the iPads and what happens if you don’t have Internet access at home and some of those practical questions.
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The day finally comes when the auditorium is full of parents who all have questions. Some are taking notes and some have their iPads and some have their arms crossed. The folks at the school who were in charge of this process are standing up on stage and the question start coming out. There is a review and the parents are told what’s going to happen. Yes, all of the students are going to be provided iPads. There are about 1000 of them. They are eventually going to replace textbooks. They spent some time talking about how this is paid for and what that means in terms of academics and their goals and those kinds of things. There were lots of questions. They were the things you expect. What happens if my kid breaks it? Am I responsible for a $500 iPad? We are a family who doesn’t have Wi-Fi access in our home; what can we do to make sure our kid has access to the academic experience that the other kids are going to have? Obvious of the questions about social media. What happens if my kid is doing nothing but Facebook and class? A lot of these questions came up in the parent meeting.
I had some more in-depth questions then I could get taken care of in that meeting. I asked for a chance to sit down and talk to the folks at the school about all the history and those kinds of things related to the iPad project. Here is a little bit of an expert from the interview.
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WADE WINGLER: Today on Assistive Technology Update I am in the field at Danville community high school. We are talking to the folks who are rolling out one of the first programs into the nation to really replace textbooks with an iPad. We are going to talk about some of the in’s and out’s of those things. I am with Glenda Pate, Lyle Messinger, and Molly Wininger, and we are going to have a roundtable discussion here about iPads in the hands of high school students. Folks, thanks for spending time with me this afternoon. I know you’re busy and I’m glad you are able to take some time out of your schedule.
Lyle, can you give me a quick overview of how many iPads are being deployed here in Danville and what that rollout process looks like?
LYLE MESSINGER: We currently have a plan to roll out about 1000 iPads at the secondary level. We currently are about 100 staff members strong with respect to the iPads and about 500 students on the way to about 825 with respect to the students.
WADE WINGLER: Your role is at the big picture level in terms of this project, right? Is that fair to say?
LYLE MESSINGER: Right.
WADE WINGLER: Molly, you’re in the trenches every day helping faculty or staff and students figure out how to wrap their brain around what this means and that kind of stuff. Can you give me some idea of how the students are reacting to this and how teachers and parents are reacting to the iPad project as well?
MOLLY WININGER: I think the students are taking it well for the most part. They are very familiar with technology for the most part. It’s a very intuitive device. It’s just getting the workflow out to them and getting them to wrap their brains around that. They are living it for organization purposes. The calendars, the ability to collaborate with the friends, they are using Google Docs and Gmail, so that the communication has increased among not only classmates but also among teachers and students. I don’t know if you have heard, the focus is read, write, research. We are just making sure everyone can read on the device, they can research on the device through the web browser, and of course write using the app that we give them.
WADE WINGLER: A lot of folks in our audience are special educators and worked in schools, but other folks are technology enthusiasts and use assistive technology devices. I don’t think we need to explain what is an iPad for folks who are listening today. But can anybody here tell me what is on one of the iPads that are deployed, what kind of apps are out there, and maybe a little bit about what’s not?
MOLLY WININGER: For the general student, and the orientation we go through the basics of some of those native apps and those key apps we are going to be using. One, like I mentioned, calendar, mail. We use Google apps at the school so they are using that. IBooks is going to be crucial. Also they had a web browser that allows them to access the Internet. It is restricted through lightspeed, the browser we use. They’ll use good reader which is kind of like a middleman which allows them to download documents from Google Docs and view them at home if they don’t have Wi-Fi available. They are able to manipulate and annotate on that and send in homework to teachers and receive homework from teachers.
WADE WINGLER: That’s a lot of apps. What about textbooks? Architect books on there yet?
MOLLY WININGER: Text books are not on there yet. We do have some PDF files from textbooks depending on the resources that the teachers currently have from their most recent textbook adoption. They might have components or parts of the textbook. I know the English department as a good amount of their short stories and nonfiction pieces from the textbook available as PDFs. We have downloaded those and put them into collections for teachers to push out to kids. So they have selections from their textbook, same with a lot of our science teachers, our chemistry, biology. Lyle could talk more on text books.
LYLE MESSINGER: We have a selected number of books that are available to us. We have a multi tiered strategy for content on the device. The gold standard for us would be could we get a well-designed textbook from a text book publisher, which is iPad ready? If the iPad, is it e-book ready? If that e-book ready, with a allow us to take a PDF? If that PDF, you are moving down. Is it format shifting? Can it do that? What part of fair use applies to that individual material?
Many of the text books also have online versions. We can access those with respect to the number of books we purchase. For example, we purchase 100 US history books. We are given a code and can access the online version of the book to 100 copies.
The problem with that is accessibility. We understand that not everybody has high-speed Internet at home. That’s not really our goal. We are centered on putting things on the device so you can read on the bus, in the park, anywhere. 24/7 availability is what we are looking for for the material, as it were a book.
Moving down, there are some teacher-produced materials or content. Those would be available. And that of course within the fair use, making copies of those. It’s really a process. We’ve been talking to publishers for a little over a year now. Some are really far advanced with respect to this and some are more lagging. I would not be surprised – again, more on the edge. I wouldn’t be surprised if within three or four years we would see 50 percent materials. Education is changing a little bit. The model of having a textbook and using that textbook – and when you are done with the textbook, that last page, you’re done with the course – is a little bit different. What we are hoping is while we support the teacher with the textbook, we are still keeping our paper copies of the textbooks. We’ve already paid for them so we are still using those. The teacher will find content on the web which is rich and interactive or engages the student in whatever that habit might be. What percentage of that is going to be within the class will depend on the individual course. We are hoping to grow that.
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WADE WINGLER: I’m starting to learn that we are not exactly replacing textbooks lock stock and barrel right away. This is a process that takes some time. Although we think that this is one of the first times that this has happened in Indiana where there is one-to-one iPad program program for students at an entire high school, the concept of rolling out technology to replace text books or at least enhance and has been around for a while. A little bit of research: there is a Sun Journal I will link to in the show notes that talks about the fact that the state of Maine has been doing this for 10 years. Dave been rolling laptops out too high school students. They rolled out 72,000 laptops across the state, and it cost the state taxpayers around $7 million, or $242 per student per year. But they are getting some results. There is some evidence that says running test have improved, math skills have improved, and there are some quotes here. Justin Mao, who oversees instructional technology for the Maine Department of Education, says, “When kids are engaged, you can teach them anything.” Although this isn’t a brand-new idea, we are learning that takes some time to run the iPads or other kinds of digital technology to get students on board to be able to use them.
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WADE WINGLER: It’s becoming obvious to me that the iPads are here to stay. Then my questions start to be more personal. What happens when my kid breaks or iPad or does something wrong with it? Which leads to another series of interesting questions.
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WADE WINGLER: Theft, destruction, what happens when my kid throws or iPad out the school bus window into the rain?
LYLE MESSINGER: Evildoers. There are lots of ways accidents can happen or mishaps can happen. We try to mediate some of those through structural changes. For example, the staff is really good at identifying trouble stops. What do you do when you go to the restroom? Do you leave that on a shop and go into a stall where you can’t see it? Or do you put it on the floor? There are a lot of things like that that will remedy. In that case we have baskets that are in the individual stall that you can place the iPad. What do you do after school? You generally don’t have access to your locker if you are in a sport or in the band. What do you do with it then because it doesn’t live well in an automobile due to temperature extremes. We are in the process of putting in small lockers that a student can use after school, just large enough to put a book back in and not much more. That gives any kind of what materials out of there. Is just an iPad locker.
But with all that said and the inherent safety devices within the iPad – we took a look at the cover and shock protection and things like that – if one is damaged, we do have a warranty available to us for the first year. A parent is libel up to $100 for that warranty service. It becomes to the point where it’s not usable, it’s lost, stolen, or damaged to the point where it’s not usable, they are also responsible for a $100 deductible on that. That’s for the first iPad for the given year. After that, an individual meeting will be held and see if this is the appropriate device for the student, or if it’s simply an accident and maybe we simply replace it. If it’s one that we will replace, it’s purely accidental or mischief on somebody else’s part, then we will replace it as quickly as possible. It takes a little bit of time but we are trying to close that window.
The device comes with checking on it, so if it is stolen, if the parent or guardian wants to track it, we can. It’s only done within the presence of the police and with a police report filed. If you’re willing to file a police report, come on in and with the police officer present we will turn on the tracking device and let the police do their work. We wanted to make sure that there was no perceived viewing remotely or tracking or anything. We really wanted to put an actually high bar for that so no one feels like we are invading.
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WADE WINGLER: One of the other questions that was floating around from the very beginning of the announcement of the iPad was how is it going to be paid for. IPads cost $500 or more. Does that mean my textbook rental fleets are going to go up? Are parents going to have to pay for these things? We learned next that there is an interesting things way these things are paid for without really changing a whole lot of the fees passed on to families. Here is some information about how these things are paid for.
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WADE WINGLER: What does it cost? Who pays for them? What happens when one gets broken? What are those implications with the iPad rollout?
LYLE MESSINGER: They cost $600, but that comes with the apps. How we finance it is threefold. First, we have a bond that we issue, sort of seed money to begin with. That was captured with the financing that we made with bonds we paid off early which allowed us to rebound.
There are some savings we are hoping to gain using the iPad. That was number one. The second is we went on extended use on our textbook. The state of Indiana allows you to recover the cost of the textbook over a six year cycle. At that point you can apply [Inaudible] extended use. They reduce the amount that you can charge percentagewise for the textbook, but you can continue to collect for those. You would normally have some cost associated with that. We have taken those fees and applied them towards the iPad. Some of that is charge of your textbook, some of it is straight to the parent as a textbook fee. We were mandated by our school board to stay within the footprint of the existing book fee. If you pay $200 in book fees, we couldn’t really vary from that very much. We had to make some numbers work. We were really pleased that we came on average less. We don’t know how long we can do that, but we were very happy.
The third source of funding is a grant that we wrote last year that allows us to do some things with respect to professional training and allows us to some materials. We are in the process of being able to purchase many of the apps for the grant. Molly’s position is as facilitator through there. It’s three sources. The bond over a number of years. We are hoping it will move toward a self-supporting system using the textbooks and then a grant.
WADE WINGLER: We mention the cost to families. By the way, I didn’t notice the difference in my tech book fee this year. I’ve had people ask me that: so, does it cost you a lot? No, it cost me something about the same. That was the impact on our house as well.
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WADE WINGLER: After all the planning and deciding what apps go on these devices and how to pay for them and how to roll them out and all those kinds of things, they show up. We spent a little time in this next section with my daughter Katie talking about what this iPad means from her perspective.
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WADE WINGLER: Your high school rolled out iPads to other students, right?
KATIE: Yes.
WADE WINGLER: They are in the process of rolling them out, right?
KATIE: Right.
WADE WINGLER: Earlier this week you got your iPad. Tell me about it.
KATIE: I can get my homework off of it if I did you put it on. Sometimes they don’t. You can go on the Internet [Music interupts] I apparently have music on the Internet right now. You can email your teachers and email anyone in the school system because everyone has a school-distributed email.
WADE WINGLER: Only people inside the school or outside too?
KATIE: Outside too.
WADE WINGLER: So you can pretty much email anybody?
KATIE: Yeah.
WADE WINGLER: Okay.
KATIE: You can download photos on it. I have 114 pages on my right now.
WADE WINGLER: Pictures of what?
KATIE: All kinds of stuff. I have pictures of my favorite singer and my favorite actresses.
WADE WINGLER: Who is your favorite singer?
KATIE: Christofer Drew Ingle from Never Shout Never.
WADE WINGLER: What kind of apps that come loaded with?
KATIE: They have most of our apps in files, like our language arts file, math, science, social studies. Then we have news where we have Chicago Tribune, CNN, Indy Star, New York Times, and USA Today. And then we have Google Earth and obviously the notepad that comes on the iPad. Google Books, Maps, typing test. It’s really hard to type on these things sometimes. I’m kind of good at it. Then there is a bunch of stuff I don’t use. I put it into a file that I labeled don’t use because I don’t use it.
WADE WINGLER: Like what kind of stuff gets in the don’t need?
KATIE: Dropbox, app start, dictation, overdrive, clicker, game center, videos, contacts, iPod — because we can put music on it.
WADE WINGLER: You can put music on it?
KATIE: Know. We can put anything on it. But I got on the Internet and went to a website that you can listen to music.
WADE WINGLER: Wait a minute. You guys can’t add anything to the iPads?
KATIE: No.
WADE WINGLER: Why is that, you think?
KATIE: Because it is the schools iPad, not ours.
WADE WINGLER: Yeah, but don’t you think it would be useful to add apps to it?
KATIE: I think so but we can’t.
WADE WINGLER: Why do you think they don’t allow that?
KATIE: Because some people would probably go overboard and put so many games on it and they wouldn’t focus in class because they would be playing Angry Birds or something.
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WADE WINGLER: It became kind of obvious to me pretty quickly that one of the main draws for using an iPad for high school freshmen as some of the more entertainment oriented things, music and social media and those kinds of things. Which started make me wonder, how are we going to use this useful device in an academic way but they keep kids from using it as a tour rather than as a tool?
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[Singing] We don’t need no education; we don’t need no thought control.
LYLE MESSINGER: Lightspeed is a browser which allows us to filter in the building and also at home. Something that’s a home response ability, but we didn’t want to – we were cautious of putting the burden on the parents that we give the child the device, up to the bedroom to do homework, and now the supervision is 100 percent. We felt that we have some response ability in that partnership with the parent. It does slow the device down. It does limit your research. But a lot of houses have other computers. If you need to get out and look at something which may be very legitimate but due to a key search on our restrictor you may not be able to get to, there may be another source you can get to on that. There is no idea of privacy at all. We can take a student’s iPad at any time and take a look at their correspondence as well as the parents. We encourage the parent to do that. It’s your child. It is their work. Look at it regularly. Look at it in detail. We are going to try to do the same.
WADE WINGLER: I’m one of those nerdy parents. My daughter has had email since – I can’t remember when she didn’t have email. It’s set up so that I get blind copied on everything that comes and goes out of her email box. Now that she has a telephone that allows her to text, she knows that if I walk up and hold my hand out, what I want is her phone. I said that’s the price of admission for having a phone like that. I check not every day but several times a week. I walk up and grab her phone and look through it. She rolls her eyes but she knows that’s part of it.
LYLE MESSINGER: I think it’s our duty as a guide. It’s not just littering one plus one equals two. What does that mean? Etiquette always seems to lag behind the technology. What is the appropriate use of that technology? We also limited social networking at this time simply because of how distracting it can be. There are powerful uses of social websites, unbelievably powerful, but they are also unbelievably distracting. Well we may actually have some of our school stuff – for example, we have some sports things that share our social website, academic material will not be at this time. There will be one thing you can’t get to on the device, is any kind of social networking site. That’s limited as well.
There are other things like games and music. They are limited in that a student cannot add an app. That limits some of it. Like I said many times before, we have really smart students at all levels. Whether by accident or by design, they can find a way around. That’s not all necessarily bad but is something we have to be mindful of. We restrict what’s on the device by restricting the apps, how they are placed on it.
WADE WINGLER: How do you guys stay ahead of the students? How do you stay ahead of the kids? With the technology changing so fast and the fact that you’re implementing things in stages and doing some trial and error, whose job is it to be smarter than the kids in making sure that the technology isn’t being used inappropriately?
LYLE MESSINGER: All of us.
MOLLY WININGER: I think from the teachers’ standpoint. Like we stress can’t during the distribution and to the teachers individually, it’s just classroom management, being aware of what your kids are doing on their iPads while they are in your class, walking around, checking what they’re doing. Maybe throwing out that caution, every now and then you walk up to a student and stick your hand up and say let me see your device can’t let me read her emails, we have the right to do that. During the distribution it is clearly stated to the student. Like Lyle said, they have no right to privacy. This is a school device. They are borrowing this device. This is not for entertainment purposes. This is for educational use. Anything you do on it should be geared toward your education, should be enhancing it, whether it is your communication, your writing, whatever. Also, we have a lot of good kids who come to us. Hey, did you know so and so, did you know kids are doing this on the iPad? We have a student support center with a lot of tech savvy kids that are in there three periods a day, and they are on top of the game. We had a couple of kids that are exceptionally tech savvy and will say I tried this and did you know this possible. They come to us at the forefront and say how can you stop this, how can you fix this. They are breaking the system only to help us.
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WADE WINGLER: I think we are learning that when you take textbooks through an entire high school and try to replace them with something like an iPad, there is a lot of planning, costs, things you need to put in place to make sure these devices are used as tools rather than toys. This is the end of part one of iPad high school. Next week we are going to spend some time talking with a special ad director and what this means for students with disabilities, some of those assistive technology implications. We also spent time talking to some of mine and Katie’s family members and what they think about the iPad. We also spent some time talking to professionals in the field who are concerned about some unintended consequences, maybe some things that the folks at Denville either have thought about and haven’t revealed their plans for yet or maybe need to put on their agenda to think about. Visit us next week when we spend a little more time talking about iPad high school. In the meantime, if you have questions for our listener line can’t give us a call at 317-721-7124, you can find us on Twitter at INDATA Project. You can also find us on Facebook at Facebook.com/INDATA. Until next week, I’m Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indiana.