The Whole World in Their Hands
A North Carolina middle
school didn’t have enough
computers to give students
reasonable access to the
Internet, so administrators
implemented a one-to-one
iPod touch program. Now
every student is connected.
© ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/PIERREDESVARRE
If you were to walk around Grey Culbreth Middle School in North Carolina today, you’d notice some
very engaged students using iPod
touches in a variety of ways. Drop
in to a science class, for example,
and you’d see students using these
handheld mobile devices to identify
bacteria they had collected from different areas of the school. Stop by the
art room, and you’d find groups of
students visiting museums all over the
world and collaborating about works
of art. In a social studies classroom,
you’d see students researching, identifying, and using primary-source
documents to learn about historical
events. Even in the study halls, you
would see kids using the touch to
organize class work, take notes, and
check assignment due dates.
For the past two years, our central
North Carolina school has put an iPod
touch into the hands of all of our nearly 700 students. This is a big improvement over the technology we had before. Most classrooms at Culbreth have
only a few classroom computers. So if
students needed to search the Internet
or access a website, they often burned
valuable classroom time waiting for a
seat in front of the monitor.
By Helen Crompton,
Lynne Goodhand,
and Susan Wells
That’s why, at a time when other
schools are clamping down on the use
of handheld mobile devices, Culbreth
is going in the opposite direction: recognizing the role these devices play in
our society and embracing their use in
the classroom.
Culbreth’s iPod touch program is not
a replacement for desktop computers,
but a complement to them. Students
are not expected to write essays on the
tiny keyboards. But if they were asked
to research the food source of an antelope, they would not have to move
from their seats to find the answer.
How We Got Here
In the spring of 2008, Culbreth staff
partnered with North Carolina Virtual
Public Schools (NCVPS) to create the
first online middle school curriculum
in the United States. NCVPS offers
more than 72 online courses—AP
classes, world languages, and credit
recovery courses—to students across
the state.
In writing the grant, Culbreth teachers and administrators thought long
and hard about embedding technology
in schools. We considered our own
pedagogical practices and evaluated the
