Ubiquitous

      I took a tour of Columbia Elementary last week to see how iPads were being used and I went, I saw and I was amazed. My new favorite word right now is "ubiquitous". And that's how I saw the use of the iPads in the second grade classrooms of Columbia. Some students were being given the mCLASS test and some students were reading. A few students were studying vocabulary words using a hangman game. Some of the iPads were part of a station and others were for individual reading assignments. One of the goals of our innovation grant is to increase reading comprehension and this is obvious when you look at the level of student engagement in their learning. The official name we gave our grant was "TARGET": Teaching to Achieve Results and Growth using Educational Technology.

Now, I have a background as a high school English teacher and I'm not that versed in Reading Instruction. Fortunately, one teacher took the time to show me a handout listing the Five Components of Reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary development, and reading comprehension strategies. That sounds complicated, but to look around the classroom, it was easy to see all of these skills steadily developing in each student. And it was the ubiquitous use of the iPad that made this process more fun, more engaging, and more lasting for the young people in these lucky classrooms.

One app I looked at was a storybook. I can’t remember the name of it, but basically what you could do is record your voice while reading the text. I got to thinking that this would be a great activity for a grandparent. When the student is visiting a grandparent, he/she could narrate the story, then the grandchild would listen to it over and over while hearing the narration; kind of a long-distance read aloud. It just goes to show that the uses of a tool like this for teaching reading are not completely known. More ideas are emerging every day. We certainly don’t want to replace the read aloud with a grandparent, but an app like this might add to the whole experience.