Not your parents' classroom anymore

Oceanside Middle School students utilizes iPads during a lesson late last month.

Courtesy Oceanside School District

The Notability app allows students to take and organize notes and to allow others to view their work.

Courtesy Oceanside School District

The Educreations app allows students to create full scale videos that can be shared with both teachers and other students.

Courtesy Oceanside School District

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For parents and other observers who graduated from middle school more than ten years ago, walking into a classroom at Oceanside Middle School can be both a revelation and somewhat disconcerting.

The teacher’s instructions no longer mean taking out a clean sheet of lined paper and a number 2 pencil.

Instead, it’s fire up your iPad and open Notability.

Teachers no longer move row to row, giving out assignments and then later collecting them again.

Students do not carry heavily-laden backpacks, instead carrying an iPad and some ancillary material.

Notes are no longer inscribed on a blackboard — or even a whiteboard — as teachers and students effortlessly send each other assignments, notes, projects and short videos.

Aides no longer have to crank out hundreds of photocopied pages for teachers to use in their classrooms. Everything is digital and paperless.

Instead of physical books, there are now e-books. Instead of notebooks there are apps such as Edmodo and Notablility. Instead of physical backpacks, there is now eBackpack. Instead of chalk there is now a computer-generated screen on a large monitor. There is very little paper in today’s classroom.

When a reporter mentioned that to Bob Fenter, the assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction for the Oceanside schools and the coordinator of the district’s iPad initiative, he laughs.

“Nearly all the functions that we used to do with paper are now being done electronically,” he said. “Sure, it saves lots of paper, but our goal was not just to save paper, but to make our students receptors and providers of education. With the technology, students are put in the position of teaching as well as learning.

Fenter points out that it is not the iPad by itself that is the main learning tool, but the apps that run on the machine. He pointed to a few apps that do the heavy lifting and allow the iPad initiative to be an educational success.

Notability

Notability is billed by its website as one of the most fully-featured note-taking programs, which supports text, images and audio recording and also contains a sketch pad that allows users to mark up images and other imported text.

Fenter says it is the main tool that students use on the iPad.