The following characteristics may indicate that a pupil needs help to overcome barriers to writing (not all pupils will exhibit all these characteristics):
A reluctant writer is one who experiences one or more barriers to the writing process on a regular basis. Barriers may be exhibited during the process of writing as well as, or instead of, the start of the process. In addition, a reluctant writer may be defined as one whose writing is habitually superficial, either because ideas are not expanded or because the writing is executed in haste. Before identifying a pupil as a reluctant writer careful observation is required to differentiate between characteristics of reluctance and compositional styles.
The volume of technology use in a school expands significantly when students have a personal iPad but more importantly its use to support learning in lessons on a daily basis also increases enabling teachers to plan new and more creative types of activities they could not previously adopt.
Agency - Personal ownership of a powerful device like the iPad empowers learners to be more independent but teachers need to engineer the conditions for this to flourish by:
- Providing learners with more opportunities to decide how to undertake a task, where to work on the task and at what pace.
- Developing greater trust with learners to be independent learners.
- Considering how to trust learners to use the iPad to research and locate infomration for themselves, reducing the role of the teacher as 'information giver'.
Various factors were identified as necessary before a successful deployment of iPads/tablets is likely to be successful in a school context:
- Teachers need to be equipped with their own personal iPad which they can learn to use through 'play' in advance of the full deployment
- Traditional models of ICT training are less effective since the iPad is very intuitive. Teachers learn best through informal, show and tell activities and by forming their own self help communities (e.g. Teach Meets)
The iPad is a consumer device used increasingly in a corporate setting such as a school or college. Certain infrastructure issues were identified in this research which were highlighted as crucial for an effective deployment of iPads at scale:
iPads were deployed in one of three configurations:
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