The first week of February was quite eventful for the students here at NPHS. Excluding the Seniors, all students received a brand new iPad. There were many speculations on how things would pan out, but just about all of the students were looking forward to getting their hands on their very own tablet. The teachers, not so much. The easy access to distracting social networks and games made many of the teachers a bit hesitant. However, in this reporter’s opinion everything is working out just fine.

At first, I thought the Board of Ed. had finally lost it. It seemed like they were asking for kids to spend their time on Snapchat or blowing off steam by tweeting some interesting things about their teachers. Well, the first day or so, many of the students did just that. But once the wow factor died down, the students realized that the iPads were quite handy when it came to note taking or typing an answer.   As time went on, Notability surpassed Whale Trail in popularity and Keynote became more commonly used than Instagram. It has been about a month now, and the iPads are becoming a necessity of the day to day learning process.

It appears the teachers are also starting to warm up to the idea of trusting the students to use the iPads properly. Although they still try to sneak up from behind for a little detective work occasionally, it is evident that they are a little less worried about the distracting aspects of the iPads. The teachers have been doing a fantastic job implementing the devices into their curriculums. Some of the classes have the option for all work to be completed on the iPads. There are many new projects available that allow the students to really get creative on the tablets.

There appeared to be a downside to these seemingly perfect devices. Since there is such a vast number of them, there has been some trouble working out the technical issues. These seem to be little kinks that will be worked out along the way, but they can be quite frustrating. Classes sometimes waste a period trying to figure out why some kids didn’t receive the shared document in google drive or figuring out if they should be on Pioneer or Pioneer2. However, tech support is doing an absolutely incredible job fixing every problem the students throw at them. And for the past week or so, everything has been running pretty smoothly.

Tech support asks that if there is a problem, the student experiencing difficulty brings it to their attention so it can be fixed and prevented in the future. Hopefully the bugs will continue to lose the fight against our awesome staff at tech support.

The iPads are quickly becoming a necessity in the classroom. Sometimes I wonder how we lived without them.