Shorewood Students Kick Off School Year With iPads

The Shoreline School District is one of nearly 600 school districts nationwide to roll out iPads for their students this fall, but by giving all Shorewood students a device, the district's rollout is one of the largest. 

Last Thursday, incoming Shorewood freshmen HyeJoo Ro and Rylee Sullivan picked up their new iPads in the school's library and downloaded file sharing system DropBox to them. In some cases, the iPad will replace physical textbooks.

 “It will nice to not carry around all those books,” Sullivan said.

Parents seem to be behind the iPad rollout.

“I think it’s awesome for them,” said parent Michaela Won, as her freshman son June Won picked up his iPad and downloaded software for it. “Most parents can’t afford these. It’s great for to have that opportunity.”

Her son agreed.

“It’s pretty sweet,” he said. “They make it pretty organized and I’m not organized so it helps.”

June Won said he expected the iPad to be most helpful in English or science classes.

Jim Golubich, the director of Instructional Technology, said ome students have their own and will use those, while some will opt-out of the program.

"We always have an opt-out policy if parents don’t want them to take on that responsibility or just want to provide for their own at home," he said.

The district also makes laptops available to students during the school day when they know they are going to need them for something in class.

"They can go to the tech office and check out a laptop to use for that class and then return it but they’re responsible for keeping track of their assignments and everything," he said.

Many of the districts deploying the laptops are smaller scale maybe a 300-student school or a couple classrooms within a school or a grade level, Golubich said.

"I don’t think there are that many around the country that are going comprehensively for student body of a school this size. I think we’re in the minority of those 600," he said. 

"Yes we’re maybe a little larger of an initiative than what you see in other districts, but we’re coming off of five years of having one-to-one laptops," he added. "So a lot of the logistics and the intergration into the classroom is already in place we’re just changing ot a different device."

An application was recently released for the math textbooks for Algebra I, II and Geometry used at Shorewood so once the school gets the code students won't have to carry around the textbooks, Golubich said. Other textbooks and books can also be downloaded easily.

"In some cases they’ll be replacing the physical textbook so they’ll be able to access the entire textbook on their own iPad," Golubich said.

How much the iPads are used will vary from class to class and subject to subject, Golubich said.

"In this school we find walking through the halls with the laptops it was not uncommon at all to peek into windows and see class after class doing something in groups or in pairs or individually," he said. "They probably use them for the whole period bring out 20 minute assignment or respond to something a teacher gave a prompt to. But it really I does I think depend on the content area, the curriculum and to some degree the comfort level of the teacher."

Online content accessed at school is filtered at Shorewood, while at home its up to the parents how they want to handle that.

"At home they’re not under our filtering systems but we can offer that to parents at their request, more parental controls for home," Golubich said. "Typically we find that families like to monitor their own use at home in  their own fashion but we offer some support in that area if their interested."

Theft of devices has declined year-by-year-by-year with the laptops as students get used to taking care of these and responsible for them, Golubich said.

"It becomes more matter of fact. I think there was some novelty the first year when we had our highest incident rate but ever since then its been very very light," Golubich said. "We’re expecting these to be easier to keep track of they should be even more secure because they’re not a separate case they’re carrying around and having to keep track of."