As the new school year ushers in grand changes, there have been many critiques. The uncomfortable shift from laptops to iPads has left students and teachers feeling uneasy and confused. The switch could possibly be attributed to the HSE school board’s commitment to providing students with “the best possible quality at the lowest cost for the user,” per the HSE Board of Trustee’s recordkeeping website, BoardDocs. The HSE district’s Director of Educational Technologies Jeff Harrison suggests that having students stay with iPads from K-12 will “give them a sense of familiarity and therefore they can spend more time in the classroom learning and less time in the technology office troubleshooting.” However, after years of laptops being the norm for high school students, the abrupt switch to iPads has left freshmen raising eyebrows.
The recent switch to iPads in the HSE School District has proven to be problematic for students. Freshman Sarah Cooper is enrolled in classes with upperclassmen, and she has struggled with classwork that is meant to be completed on a laptop.
“No one in my class can help me with online assignments because they all have laptops,” Cooper said. “Not even the teachers know how to work the iPads.”
It is frustrating for freshmen, like Cooper, to not receive assistance in class because teachers and students are not familiar with the mechanics of the iPads.
Additionally, since students with school iPads do not have access to the App Store, they are forced to find other ways to access necessary apps for school. Freshmen have resorted to using the Canvas website through Safari which is the only approved web browser on HSE iPads. This has demonstrated a lack of user-friendliness.
“I think the biggest change for students is that the HSE iPads do not allow access to some applications/websites like the personal devices do,” science teacher Eric Sturges said.
HSE is no stranger to digital work. With many assignments such as essays being typed instead of handwritten, the design of the iPad keyboards are very finicky and make it difficult for students to type without keys getting stuck or having other issues.
“Lots of my assignments are on OneNote, and it is very hard for me to type on OneNote with the iPad keyboard,” freshman Scarlett Fanger said.
Some teachers at HSE have also recognized issues with the keyboards.
“I am concerned about my freshman students having to use the iPad keyboards on timed tests, like the AP exam,” AP World teacher Jamie Follis said. “The keyboards are not beneficial to students in a setting with time constraints.”
Not only are the iPads inconvenient for schoolwork, the sheer size of them are not suitable for the smaller swivel desks that are common in many HSE classrooms.
“When students set up their iPads with the keyboards out, it takes up nearly the entirety of [the swivel desks],” geometry teacher Kirk Webber said. “I frequently see students that cannot fit everything on their desks, and the iPads often fall off and could possibly get damaged.”
While the district’s decision to transition from laptops to iPads may have been driven by a desire to balance quality and cost, the shift has introduced a series of challenges that cannot be overlooked. The struggles faced by both students and teachers in adapting to the new devices highlight the unintended consequences of this change, such as difficulties with functionality, limited access to necessary applications and physical inconveniences in the classroom, Even though the transition has been far from seamless, hopefully as the school year progresses students and teachers will be able to adjust to using iPads for classwork.
