Introduction
As I am finishing up my contract and changing jobs I thought this would be a good opportunity to reflect on my experience teaching with tablets, using electronic textbooks, and a smart TV. I will try to give a fair account of my experience and will refrain from using my company's name. But to give a little background about my experience; I taught tablet classes for a large franchise English foreign language academy with students in middle school and elementary school...yes we gave tablet to elementary school students :)The Good
There are several aspects in which teaching with a tablet can be better than teaching with paper textbooks. For example, using tablets make it easy to edit and improve student's writing. The dynamics of a tablet classroom is that the teacher’s tab is connected to all the students tablets. And the teacher's tab is connected to a smart TV. So when students are finished completing a writing exercise they submit it to the teacher's tab. The teacher can then display the student's writing on the smart TV to go over with the class and provide discussion as well as edit spelling and grammar mistakes. What I found useful in my classes was using the smart pen over student's typed writing so the student can make corrections on their tab and submit it again. I think this type of exchange is one of the most valuable parts of teaching with tablets because it allows a fast feedback loop for the student to see their mistakes and correct them. It's a great hands-on experience similar to the old-school way of submitting an essay to your teacher and waiting several weeks until they handed it back to you. Essay corrections were always the most helpful to me as a student because I was looking at my own words with the teacher's comments and corrections.Another benefit of the tablet classroom is improved note-taking. The teacher’s tab is able to take screenshots of every student’s tab and display their note-taking on the Smart TV. This allows the teacher to have a group discussion about the information students decide to include in their notes for the listening passages. The teacher can ask students to clarify their meaning about keywords they wrote down for a particular detail. If a student can’t understand the complete idea or can’t read their writing then the teacher can play listening passages again. The teacher can also talk about parts of the student's note-taking that aren’t important details. When discussing notes, the teacher becomes aware of the information students wrote down in their notes so when students are introduced to questions about the listening passage the teacher can remind some students who wrote down key while they took notes.
For a teacher, staying aware of students using their tablets during class time is very valuable. There is so much more real-time information that can be gathered using tablet software teaching a class. For each section students submit their answers to the teacher. In one view a teacher can see answers from every student for a particular question. That way the teacher can quickly and honestly see which students are having trouble on a particular question instead of asking the general question to the class; does everyone understand? This also helps with classroom management.
Personally, when I saw some students talking while others were doing work I checked my tab to see if those students completed the assignment and had time to relax, or were they distracted and not doing their work, or are they doing their work incorrectly and need to look at it again. With tablets teachers can do all this quickly without having to walk over to each student's desk and look at an upside down textbook.
One of the biggest potential benefits with tablet teaching is group projects. Students have the potential to build interesting PowerPoints and videos related to the material that we go over in class. Unfortunately, my company was still in the experimental phase with this part of their tablet program. Because I was teaching young students there were certain things blocked on the students tab such as internet, email, and connecting their tab to the classroom smart TV. So we couldn't find a way to get the students to present their created project to the class effectively because they couldn't connect to the smart TV. But building interesting group projects relatively quickly (i.e. using Google Slides or Microsoft Powerpoint) and providing easy to use video editing software would allow them to present projects using the smart TV in a collaborative effort. Using Google Slides has great potential to build fast presentations because it allows multiple students to collaborate on a single presentation document in real-time. This way the class can select groups and assign different tasks for students to work on such as internet article research, script writing, finding images to design a layout, and create interesting group videos. This type of activity is what my students seemed to enjoy the most.
Another benefit with tabs is automatic updates to the electronic textbook. When my company launched the tablet program they incorporated a Google+ community for teachers to post comments about general problems they were experiencing with the new tablet classroom. In addition, any textbook errors teachers would come across while teaching the class could be revealed to headquarters in the community. This platform has really let teachers voice their opinions in a collaborative way, and it has provided the company with valuable feedback and updated information on their material. It keeps the material not only relevant and fresh but also accurate.
Electronic textbooks also provide embedded audio files that allow students to play listening passages several times using headphones. Paper textbooks only will have an audio CD attached in the back of the book. So studying this way requires the student to have their textbook and an audio playing device at the same time to study. And their are less and less compact disk players these days. My personal laptop doesn't have a CD player so it makes it very difficult to study and review the audio sections.
Another great advantage to teaching with tablets is that it opens up the possibilities to introduce apps and internet searches to students. Sometimes when I noticed there was a dullness in the class material or when we had extra time, I would play brain stimulating games on an app called Lumosity. The students really enjoyed competing against each other on these simple to use “educational” games. And it allowed me a chance to evaluate how well students were listening to and following directions. The undivided attention kids will give a teacher explaining a game they will get to play is very important to their listening skills. By projecting their game playing on the smart TV for the whole class to see provided extra motivation and brought out a competitive nature for students to participate in a fun activity. In addition, internet searches for topic information or vocabulary words was important in validating the usage of particular English words and expressions with google images, or helping to build interest and clarify the topic before getting into the material. By using a tablet and smart TV, this process was done very quickly and was used depending student's familiarity with the subject and questions brought about through group discussion.
The tablet software my company used needs some improvements. I’m sure a lot of these problems will get addressed as tablet teaching becomes more popular and widely used in the future. The size of tablet screens are smaller than the size of actual textbooks. And using an electronic pen usually requires users to write in a larger font size. So a problem students were having was that they couldn't take detailed notes. The electronic textbook is basically a regular textbook template inserted into a tablet. So there is unused margins and tiny spaces to use electronic pens to write the answers for fill-in-the-blank questions. Also, electronic pen technology needs to advance to where there is little difference between writing with an electronic pen and writing with an ink pen. These days, the electronic pens available to buy are awkward to write with and sometimes skip around so you often have to erase and rewrite slower. Also, a problem that I was having with my teacher tab was that there is so much data processing happening with a classroom of 15 students sending multiple submissions to my tab. This would often freeze my tab or make it lag behind.
The software was noticeable “seamed” (opposite of seamless) as you teach the class. You have to go over answers one at a time and once you switch to a different question the answer to the previous question isn't displayed anymore. Some sections would display 10 answers all together or no answers at all. So I would go over answers individually and use my electronic pen to black out answers to questions we hadn’t reviewed yet. Revealing them like a stratch it lottery ticket :). But whenever I would move the page to scroll down to cite information for the answer in the reading my blacked out electronic pen markings would disappear revealing the rest of the answers. Also sometimes I wouldn’t be able to reveal the last answer on the page because there was a limit to how many sectioned answers could be on each page. So hopefully with improved software many of these problems can be addressed.
I was teaching a tablet classroom with children. So sometimes there are extra behavioral issues involved with teaching children, especially so when giving kids a computer during class :). Behavior issues unique to a tablet classroom include students writing their answers in a different language or adding emoji's of poop to their answers they submit to the teacher so the entire class can see. At break time I’ve also noticed students running around taking pictures of each other and setting up home screen wallpapers with a picture of their classmate to annoy them.
Finally, because I taught English at a foreign language academy the technology that was given to us is in a non-English language operating system so whenever a student had a technical issue with their tabs the screen would pop-up with an explanation in a foreign language I wasn’t fluent in. This provided extra difficulty for solving technical issues during class quickly.
Overall, given my experience teaching with tablets in a classroom I would say that the technology is here to stay and it's only a matter of time until all educational settings use tablets to teach to their students. I would guess there may remain an age limit to tablet teaching simply because of the complicated nature of computers. Pre-k and kindergarten classes may struggle with the functionality of the technology; similar to how a newborn might use the newest Iphone as a chew toy and then throw it to the side for something that made sounds when you sqeeze it. But even at the earliest level of teaching the enhanced function of tablets can benefit the teacher and student relationship. And if it's not used as the basis for the class perhaps it can still be used for group projects as a supplement while we wait for smartpen technology to continually improve.
One of the biggest potential benefits with tablet teaching is group projects. Students have the potential to build interesting PowerPoints and videos related to the material that we go over in class. Unfortunately, my company was still in the experimental phase with this part of their tablet program. Because I was teaching young students there were certain things blocked on the students tab such as internet, email, and connecting their tab to the classroom smart TV. So we couldn't find a way to get the students to present their created project to the class effectively because they couldn't connect to the smart TV. But building interesting group projects relatively quickly (i.e. using Google Slides or Microsoft Powerpoint) and providing easy to use video editing software would allow them to present projects using the smart TV in a collaborative effort. Using Google Slides has great potential to build fast presentations because it allows multiple students to collaborate on a single presentation document in real-time. This way the class can select groups and assign different tasks for students to work on such as internet article research, script writing, finding images to design a layout, and create interesting group videos. This type of activity is what my students seemed to enjoy the most.
Another benefit with tabs is automatic updates to the electronic textbook. When my company launched the tablet program they incorporated a Google+ community for teachers to post comments about general problems they were experiencing with the new tablet classroom. In addition, any textbook errors teachers would come across while teaching the class could be revealed to headquarters in the community. This platform has really let teachers voice their opinions in a collaborative way, and it has provided the company with valuable feedback and updated information on their material. It keeps the material not only relevant and fresh but also accurate.
Electronic textbooks also provide embedded audio files that allow students to play listening passages several times using headphones. Paper textbooks only will have an audio CD attached in the back of the book. So studying this way requires the student to have their textbook and an audio playing device at the same time to study. And their are less and less compact disk players these days. My personal laptop doesn't have a CD player so it makes it very difficult to study and review the audio sections.
Another great advantage to teaching with tablets is that it opens up the possibilities to introduce apps and internet searches to students. Sometimes when I noticed there was a dullness in the class material or when we had extra time, I would play brain stimulating games on an app called Lumosity. The students really enjoyed competing against each other on these simple to use “educational” games. And it allowed me a chance to evaluate how well students were listening to and following directions. The undivided attention kids will give a teacher explaining a game they will get to play is very important to their listening skills. By projecting their game playing on the smart TV for the whole class to see provided extra motivation and brought out a competitive nature for students to participate in a fun activity. In addition, internet searches for topic information or vocabulary words was important in validating the usage of particular English words and expressions with google images, or helping to build interest and clarify the topic before getting into the material. By using a tablet and smart TV, this process was done very quickly and was used depending student's familiarity with the subject and questions brought about through group discussion.
The Bad
One of the main problems I had was students not coming prepared to class. They show up with uncharged tablets. Students would have to use a charger for their tab during class. We provided extension cords so that some students could charge their tab during class, but often times I would have to waste class time moving extension cords around the classroom so that everyone's tab could be charged. Also some students didn't want to move seats away from their friends in order to use the extension cord. In smaller classrooms this would probably be less of an issue but a classroom filled with cords hanging off a desk will always be a hazard to people walking around.The tablet software my company used needs some improvements. I’m sure a lot of these problems will get addressed as tablet teaching becomes more popular and widely used in the future. The size of tablet screens are smaller than the size of actual textbooks. And using an electronic pen usually requires users to write in a larger font size. So a problem students were having was that they couldn't take detailed notes. The electronic textbook is basically a regular textbook template inserted into a tablet. So there is unused margins and tiny spaces to use electronic pens to write the answers for fill-in-the-blank questions. Also, electronic pen technology needs to advance to where there is little difference between writing with an electronic pen and writing with an ink pen. These days, the electronic pens available to buy are awkward to write with and sometimes skip around so you often have to erase and rewrite slower. Also, a problem that I was having with my teacher tab was that there is so much data processing happening with a classroom of 15 students sending multiple submissions to my tab. This would often freeze my tab or make it lag behind.
The software was noticeable “seamed” (opposite of seamless) as you teach the class. You have to go over answers one at a time and once you switch to a different question the answer to the previous question isn't displayed anymore. Some sections would display 10 answers all together or no answers at all. So I would go over answers individually and use my electronic pen to black out answers to questions we hadn’t reviewed yet. Revealing them like a stratch it lottery ticket :). But whenever I would move the page to scroll down to cite information for the answer in the reading my blacked out electronic pen markings would disappear revealing the rest of the answers. Also sometimes I wouldn’t be able to reveal the last answer on the page because there was a limit to how many sectioned answers could be on each page. So hopefully with improved software many of these problems can be addressed.
I was teaching a tablet classroom with children. So sometimes there are extra behavioral issues involved with teaching children, especially so when giving kids a computer during class :). Behavior issues unique to a tablet classroom include students writing their answers in a different language or adding emoji's of poop to their answers they submit to the teacher so the entire class can see. At break time I’ve also noticed students running around taking pictures of each other and setting up home screen wallpapers with a picture of their classmate to annoy them.
Finally, because I taught English at a foreign language academy the technology that was given to us is in a non-English language operating system so whenever a student had a technical issue with their tabs the screen would pop-up with an explanation in a foreign language I wasn’t fluent in. This provided extra difficulty for solving technical issues during class quickly.
Conclusions
Overall, given my experience teaching with tablets in a classroom I would say that the technology is here to stay and it's only a matter of time until all educational settings use tablets to teach to their students. I would guess there may remain an age limit to tablet teaching simply because of the complicated nature of computers. Pre-k and kindergarten classes may struggle with the functionality of the technology; similar to how a newborn might use the newest Iphone as a chew toy and then throw it to the side for something that made sounds when you sqeeze it. But even at the earliest level of teaching the enhanced function of tablets can benefit the teacher and student relationship. And if it's not used as the basis for the class perhaps it can still be used for group projects as a supplement while we wait for smartpen technology to continually improve.
