Rachel Sailer, left, and Olivia Liebing, right, use their iPads during class at Alice Gustafson School in Batavia. (District 101, Handout)
Batavia students will be memorizing math facts, studying maps and practicing spelling with the help of iPads this year.
Fifth-grade students at Alice Gustafson Elementary School, along with their three teachers, received their own iPads as part of District 101's pilot iPad program.
By doing so, Batavia District 101 joins an increasing number of districts digging into technology budgets to ensure they aren't missing the newest educational tools.
"We're looking to the future," said Angie Sutherland, instructional technologist for Batavia. "We're preparing them for a world we can't define yet."
According to Apple, which makes the iPad, millions of the devices are part of the school day, with every state having a K-12 iPad program. Districts paying for iPads are everywhere from New York City, where officials spent more than $1 million on 2,000 iPads last year, to Auburn, Maine, where every kindergartner received his or her own device.
Officials in Batavia said the tablets engage students who are accustomed to technology in their daily lives. The devices, which stay at school, provide feedback on how the students are doing on various apps and allow teachers to tailor material to what individual students need, Sutherland said.
Administrators will examine surveys by students and teachers at the end of the year to see how the tablets affected learning and how the devices could be implemented elsewhere in the district. The pilot program is costing the district $41,000.
Larke Curnock, of Batavia, had no experience with iPads or apps when she found out she would teach in the pilot program. The district sent the teachers to a Wisconsin fifth-grade class, where they picked the brains of a teacher who had already been using it. The teachers also completed online workshops.
Now Curnock is a convert. It has been a great way to engage students, and she appreciates how it makes it easier to differentiate instruction among students, she said.
On a recent September day, Curnock was teaching a lesson about maps and continents. The students snapped to life when she suggested getting out the iPads and were soon looking up map coordinates of their houses, she said.
"We took a few minutes to explore the app," she said. "And all of a sudden they were so excited."
Math facts — a school standby in which students complete timed exercises on how many math problems they can complete — is much more popular with students now that they can use a specialized app, she said.
They now play "race the teacher" against a computerized teacher instead of a traditional worksheet, and their performance is delivered directly to her device so she can see how the students are doing.
With thousands of educational apps available, Curnock said she's finding a new way every day to use the devices in the classroom.
"This is the way the world is going," she said. "We've got to jump on it."
Other area schools are dipping into the iPad trend. Andy Barrett, director of curriculum for District 304 in Geneva, said the district budgeted $200,000 to pay for iPads and other tablets for 17 teachers and their classes across grade levels. It's a pilot program, so the district can gather information on how to best use the technology, he said.
In St. Charles, iPads are used in the science curriculum at both high schools and among students at Richmond Intermediate, said Jim Blaney, director of communications at District 303.
Blaney said iPads are a "valuable learning tool," using an example of how science students used to draw models of cells to study the parts for tests. Now they can use the iPad to take a picture of an actual cell through the eyepiece of a microscope, he said.