School officials in Auburn say a pioneering iPad program for kindergartners introduced last year, has helped dramatically improve test scores. The project attracted nationwide attention last fall when Auburn became the first school district to introduce the tablet computer into the kindergarten classroom. Now that test scores are available for the first year, many are encouraged by what they see.

"Results are very positive. We're seeing that in almost every single area in literacy, students made more growth with the iPads than they had prior," says Laura Shaw, principal at Sherwood Heights Elementary in Auburn. "Some of these cohorts of kids, you might have had 19 percnet meeting standards last year, and we're seeing that they're starting first grade with maybe 48 percent meeting standards, which is obviously a huge jump."

Shaw attributes this huge jump largely to the introduction of iPads, particularly their ability to enable teachers to more easily develop customized learning plans for different students.

"Why you don't come right up here with your iPads?" says Lisa Kurtz, as she prepares a class at Sherwood Heights for a reading exercise, using their iPads to learn new words and how to spell them.

"This is their sight words of the week," she says. "They have five words of the week, and on Thursday we use the iPads to build the words, mix them up and build them again."

The iPad initiative is this year being expanded to first-graders - like the ones Lisa Kurtz is teaching. Most of the funding comes from the school budget, which this year is providing $109,000. Education expert Mike Muir says the eventual plan is to have all children in Auburn public school grades K through 3 using iPads by 2014.

Muir has been at the center of the Auburn School Department's plan to introduce iPads to elementary students. "They see technology in other places and they're excited to work with technology." Muir says the iPads are effective in engaging the minds of today's kindergartners.

"They're still excited by all the usual stuff - working with friends and playing outside and building things," Muir says. "But they're also really excited to be using the technology."

However, not all members of the community are quite so enthusiastic about iPads - or at least the use of iPads in elementary school classrooms. Tracy Levesque is the mother of an Auburn first grader. Her concern over the introduction of iPads motivated her to run for the school committee, to which she was elected last fall.

"My overall concern with the iPad from the get-go was not the iPad. I was coming at it from a fine motor perspective," she says.

Levesque says she appreciates the difference between active screen time - i.e. using iPads in the classroom for learning purposes - and passive screentime, which is basically vegging in front ot the TV. Nevertheless, she says she wants more information on what the long-term effects might be of kids staring into a screen for many hours a day.

She also worries that excessive iPad use will hamper childrens' handwriting development, and she wants the school department to hire an occupational therapist to examine the issue.

In response, the school department points out that iPads notwithstanding, children are still being taught to write the traditional way - with pencil and paper.

But Levesque says her larger concern is over what the says is a lack of consistency in how the project is being applied.
Different teachers, she says, use the iPads in different ways and for different amounts of time. While she welcomes the improved test scores, Levesque says that without clear guidelines on iPad use, it's hard to accurately gauge their impact.

"And that's all that I have always asked for was just a more thorough approach, to make sure that, 'Yeah we're going to make some mistakes along with the way but how can we learn from those mistakes?'"

Because at the end of the day, she says, it's about whether her child succeeds, not whether the iPad passes or fails.

Photos by Tom Porter.