Bringing Tablets to Schools

Lessons Learned from High School Deployments in Germany

Heiko Weible

and Edgar Seemann

Visual Generation, Berlin, Germany

Furtwangen University, Furtwangen im Schwarzwald, Germany

Keywords:

Tablets, Schools, Teaching, Interactive, Android, iPad, Multimedia, Math, Foreign Languages.

Abstract:

Tablet deployments at schools are becoming more and more popular. Research on how to effectively use

tablets for teaching is unfortunately mostly missing. With this paper we share our experiences from various

high school deployments in Germany. During these deployments we have developed a novel learning style

designed for tablet-based teaching. We have evaluated our deployments through interviews with teachers and

students. A quantitative survey compares the use of tablet devices with laptop computers.

1 INTRODUCTION

Tablet computing is quickly spreading in schools

around the world. Even though the device category

of tablets has just been introduced a mere two years

ago, we see an astonishing rate of adoption in a mar-

ket, which used to be more conservative. We see a

wave of enthusiasm by both teachers and students un-

equal to anything we have seen before as far as com-

puting at school goes. Particularly, this excitement

seems to have completely been missing from previ-

ous laptop based school projects, such as the One-

Laptop-Per-Child movement (Negroponte, 2006) and

other deployments.

Based on our experiences gathered from high

school deployments in Germany, we want to discuss

the elements of tablet computing that make a dif-

ference. We are trying to answer the following re-

search questions: What are the strengths/weaknesses

of tablets compared to e.g. laptop computers? How

can tablets be successfully deployed at schools?

Above all, there is a need for teaching concepts

and learning content to support teachers. Teachers

have to know how best to use tablets It is certainly

not enough to just handout iPads. This is why some

deployments have failed or were discontinued.

In this paper, we present the results from inter-

views and surveys conducted in various tablet deploy-

ments at high schools in Germany. Based on these

experiences, we propose a novel interactive learning

style with a focus on tablet-based teaching. For our

deployments, we developed learning content, which

Figure 1: Main screen of the developed tablet software for

high school students.

leverages both the multimedia capabilities and sim-

plicity of use of tablet computers. The corresponding

lessons were implemented using the open data format

proposed in (Weible and Seemann, 2013).

2 RELATED PROJECTS

Research in the ﬁeld of tablet based teaching lags

obviously behind real world deployments. Schools

have started to adopt tablet devices before large scale

scientiﬁc evaluations could be performed. The ﬁrst

iPad appeared in April 2010, since then the research

community has not had much time to develop, de-

ploy and evaluate these devices. First results from

223

Weible H. and Seemann E..

Bringing Tablets to Schools - Lessons Learned from High School Deployments in Germany.

DOI: 10.5220/0004350102230228

In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2013), pages 223-228

ISBN: 978-989-8565-53-2

 2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

pilot projects have often not yet been published or

are sometimes not even scientiﬁcally evaluated. One

of the ﬁrst published results by Isabwe et al. (Is-

abwe et al., 2012b; Isabwe et al., 2012a) concentrates

on math teaching and peer assessment techniques.

Still unpublished efforts include an initiative for K12

math by Shocken et al. (Schocken, 2012) (creator of

Nand2Tetris (Schocken et al., 2009)). A more com-

prehensive discussion on the use of tablets in differ-

ent subjects is, to our knowledge, still missing. The

research community is certainly trying to close this

gap, but we are only starting to catch up.

2.1 Tablet Deployments

Tablet devices have already been widely deployed at

many schools in the US and Western Europe. Often,

these deployments result from the initiative of local

teachers and parents. Larger deployments initiated by

government organizations are much less frequent.

In the following we would like to brieﬂy mention

two examples of those deployments in Italy and Ger-

many.

One of the larger deployments is a project in sour-

thern Tyrol, Italy (Farias, 2011). Several hundreds of

students participate in a pilot project on tablet-based

teaching. The project uses Android tablets and all

school books are provided in electronic form by the

respective publishers.

The ﬁrst goal of the project to replace conven-

tional textbooks has already been accomplished and

both students and teachers are very satisﬁed with the

solution. The crucial point of adapting the text book’s

content to tablet based teaching has not yet been tack-

led by the publishers so far. In most cases they just

provide a PDF ﬁle of their traditional paper-based text

book.

Another deployment is organized by the city of

Mannheim, Germany (Klinga, 2011). This deploy-

ment of some hundred tablets is based on the popular

Apple iPad. The iPads are not supposed to replace

conventional text books, but e.g. to create multime-

dia presentations or documentations. The exact use

of the tablets in the curriculum, however, depends on

the individual teachers (Klinga, 2011).

Since publishers are not involved in the project, it

is often not obvious for teachers to ﬁnd appropriate

content. While there is a certain amount of material

available in English (e.g. in the iBook Store), content

in other languages e.g. German is mostly missing.

Many critics therefore even believe that tablet-based

teaching is a temporary, short-term fashion, which

will eventually fade. This again stresses the urgent

need for optimized, interactive content.

2.2 Learning Content

Because of the lack of scientiﬁc and practical experi-

ence, publishers and teachers seem to be unsure how

to create content for the new devices. There is no

widely accepted learning concept or content available

for tablet devices.

Apple has proposed a proprietary standard namely

iBooks to create such content and wants to provide the

technical platform. Relying on this iBook standard,

however, gives Apple full control over the distribu-

tion. More over, publishers are restricted to features

provided by the iBooks software. These are two of

several reasons why many publishers have so far been

skeptical about this platform.

Some publishers prefer the competing Android

platform developed by Google. At this moment, there

is, however, no established standard and little content

beyond traditional books (provided as E-Book).

3 COMPUTER USAGE

Historically there have been many debates on whether

to use computing devices for teaching. The more im-

portant question, however, is when and how to use

those devices. Here the new form factors of comput-

ing: laptops and tablets have paved the way to a more

ubiquitous use of computers in schools.

All of these form factors have certain strengths

and weaknesses as far as effective learning is con-

cerned. We will discuss these in the following two

subsections. In particular, we would like to point out

the reasons, why tablet devices have become so pop-

ular in such a short time.

3.1 Laptops

Even though there have been many ambitious

projects, e.g. the One-Laptop-Per-Child project by

Nicholas Negroponte (Negroponte, 2006), laptops

have not revolutionized our way of teaching. While

they are very capable devices, in fact, they are much

more capable than today’s tablet devices, teachers are

still hesitant in the adoption.

One issue has certainly been the relatively high

price for schools and students. However, the more

important issues seem to be that laptops are compli-

cated. Schools need trained system administrators to

setup and maintain the devices. And also students,

particularly younger students, need training to get ac-

customed to keyboard, mouse and a complex operat-

ing system.

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3.2 Tablets

Tablet adoption is very much on the rise, even though

they are often not cheaper than conventional laptops.

What are the reasons for this?

According to our experiences tablets provide mul-

tiple advantages over laptops. First, tablet devices

need less administration. This is, on the one hand,

due to the fact, that they currently offer a more lim-

ited set of functionalities. On the other hand, the re-

spective tablet ecosystems are tailored towards ease of

use. Students do not have to be skilled with the mouse

or keyboard and applications are typically stripped

down to the essentials, but also offering less func-

tionality than their desktop counterparts. Audio/video

playback and recording works out of the box without

turning knobs in the settings. Tablet devices are al-

ways “on” and time consuming boot up procedures

are eliminated.

The interaction through touch feels, in many

cases, more natural and is even fun to use. Ironically,

tablets feel mostly snappier than much more power-

ful laptop computers. For schools this ability to let

students interact more naturally via touch is essential.

Our evaluation has shown (see section 5) that most

students prefer this way of interaction.

4 CASE STUDY: DESIGN AND

IMPLEMENTATION

Tablet-based teaching at schools and universities is in

an early phase. The community still needs to ﬁgure

out the best ways to use tablet devices. For this it is

necessary to conduct case studies, where tablets can

be tested in practice.

For our case study, we have deployed tablets

at schools in Baden-W

urttemberg and Berlin (Ger-

many). We have conducted many in-depth interviews

with teachers and students, which provided valuable

feedback. It was also interesting to observe the stu-

dents while learning and interacting with the devices.

In the following, we will explain the design

choices, which have been made based on these expe-

riences. We will also explain the software and interac-

tive content, which has been developed during these

deployments.

4.1 Basic Software and Hardware

The interfaces of the major tablet operating systems

Android and iOS (iPad) are both simple to use. They

are, however, NOT designed with a focus on teach-

ing. That is, there is a focus on the concept of apps,

whereas we wanted to stress the learning content.

That is, the main interface should highlight lessons,

lectures and functionality (e.g. taking of pictures).

From our initial discussions with teachers and stu-

dents it became also clear, that the learning content

should be organized by subject. In order to meet

these requirements for a main interface, we developed

a novel user interface for tablet-based teaching (see

Figure 1).

Distraction of students by the possibilities of the

internet or pre-installed apps (e.g. games or Face-

book) turned out to be one of the major hurdles for

successful computing deployments. We therefore im-

plemented a Kiosk mode, where teachers could con-

trol which apps and functionalities are available to the

students.

4.2 Concepts: Learning Content

Learning content is essential, when we want to fully

exploit the potential of tablet devices. The lack of

content or even of a concept how to use existing con-

tent with tablets are the main reasons why some tablet

projects have been less successful or even abandoned.

This is e.g. the case for the Orestad Gymnasium in

Denmark where an iPad deployment has been can-

celed after 6 months of testing (Andersen, 2012).

The same is certainly true for other computing

equipment as e.g. interactive whiteboards. Those are

very widely deployed but seldom used as more than a

simple projector.

The goals of our deployments have therefore been

in two main areas. First, to provide learning content,

which is designed for tablet-based teaching. For this,

we developed a novel learning style. With this learn-

ing style we combine hearing (ear phones), seeing

(pictures and video) and doing (touch interaction) in

a way, that makes the learning experience interactive

and fun.

We want to provide two examples of our proposed

learning style. One example for teaching foreign lan-

guages and another for teaching math.

Foreign languages can be taught very effectively

with the help of a tablet device. A student can e.g.

read through an illustrated story at his own speed.

With the help of ear phones he hears the pronuncia-

tion associated with the words. He sees and hears at

the same time. New words can be learned from the

context of the story and the pronunciation can be re-

peated over and over if necessary. Touch interaction

is enabled throughout a lesson and by clicking on a

word, additional information or the translation can be

displayed.

To further encourage active participation, lessons

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Figure 2: Touch-based interaction is possible throughout

the lessons. Here an English verb is translated by clicking

on it. The translation is highlighted as a speech bubble.

are interrupted after relatively short periods of time

with questions and educational exercises or games on

the newly learned content. For foreign languages such

a game could be a word puzzle where a student has to

ﬁnd the correct spelling of a newly learned word from

a provided anagram (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: Practice the spelling of newly learned words by

shufﬂing the letters.

For math teaching similar techniques can be ap-

plied. Content and exercises should always be pre-

sented through a problem statement or story. In our

sample lesson e.g. we introduce the concept of neg-

ative numbers, through analogies in real life or com-

pute the time to travel to the international space sta-

tion ISS Newly learned facts or rules, should be im-

mediately applied through interactive questions.

Math is often not very popular with students. In

our opinion, the main reason for this is, that students

get stuck at a problem and fail to follow the rest of the

class. This is also very much true for conventional

education, where all students have to follow the pace

deﬁned by the teacher.

In order to use tablet devices effectively for math

teaching, we therefore have to make sure that students

can learn at their own pace without getting stuck. That

is, the tablet has to react to possibly wrong solutions

and intelligently help the student. For this we devel-

oped our content in a way, that a teacher can provide

hints and pointers depending on the solution provided

by the student. As students are interactively tested

after short periods of time, common mistakes can be

avoided early in the process. For our math sample

lesson e.g., we carefully analyzed the answers of 30

students and now provide updated hints and pointers

(see section 5).

The second area of improvement is in the area

of student motivation. Research in the area of seri-

ous games (Klopfer, 2008) (a term often misunder-

stood by people outside of the education community)

shows how motivational elements can help to improve

student results. Unfortunately this research has not

yet found its way to most schools. We believe that

the introduction of tablets should be accompanied by

the introduction of elements of serious games. That

is learning content should be developed with student

motivation in mind.

5 CASE STUDY: EVALUATION

Our deployments at schools in Germany started in

May 2012, since then we have gathered usage data

and evaluated the teachers’ and students’ experiences

with the devices and software.

The focus of the deployments were students in

grade 7 at German high schools. That means students

at the age of 12 to 14. We have developed a software,

which replaces the main screens of the tablet oper-

ating system with a teaching centered user interface.

For this user interface, we have created novel interac-

tive content.

The schools have been provided with a complete

bundle of hardware, software and a portable server,

which allows network and internet access to all tablet

devices.

Additionally, we have conducted trainings for the

teachers at the schools. Firstly, this has been done

to familiarize as many teachers as possible with the

usage and user interface. Often teachers see tablets

as additional technical burden and realize only later

on, that those devices coupled with the right content

can make teaching easier. The students learn by them-

selves and the teachers can concentrate on weaker stu-

dents needing special attention. Maybe this skepti-

cism comes from the teachers’ own experiences with

laptops, which are often frustratingly difﬁcult to setup

and maintain.

During the trainings, we wanted to introduce the

teachers to tablet-based teaching techniques and in

particular to the ideas behind the provided interac-

tive lectures. Finally, we wanted to demonstrate what

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tablet devices are capable of doing (e.g. as a media

production device) and in which circumstances they

are to be avoided (e.g. writing a long text). We have

received valuable feedback from these trainings. In

particular, we have received ideas for use cases we

did not have in mind initially.

For a more quantitative evaluation of the project,

we conducted a formal survey among the students in

October 2012. The obtained results will be presented

and discussed in the following paragraphs.

The ﬁrst questions, we asked in our survey, were

how tablets compare to conventional laptop comput-

ers. We wanted to know whether students prefer the

tablets for their learning efforts. Informally, students

enjoyed working with tablets. Being able to quickly

and intuitively interact with the devices really seemed

to play an important role. Our survey underlines this

impression with approximately 80% strongly prefer-

ring tablets over laptops. Only 4% think, that laptops

would be better suited for learning (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: Comparison between tablets and laptop comput-

ers. Students mostly prefer tablet devices. Possible ratings

were: 1 = strongly prefer laptops, 2 = prefer laoptops, 3 =

equally suited, 4 = prefer tablets, 5 = strongly prefer tablets.

A similar result was obtained for the ease of use.

Here 76% responded that tablet software was intuitive

and simple to use. Approximately 10% think that the

learning curve is similar to other computing devices.

Most students also seem to be content with the vir-

tual keyboard with more than 70% of the responses

arguing that a physical keyboard is not necessary.

Probably, this number very much depends on how the

tablets are used in class. In our deployments the fo-

cus was on interactive content, where keyboard input

is less of an issue.

As far as the self-reported motivation of the stu-

dents was concerned, an overwhelming 84% of the

students were more motivated when working with a

tablet than during normal classes. It remains to be

seen, whether this is a temporary effect, but at the

moment there seem to be a very positive impact in

this area.

The interactive questions and games during the

lessons were equally well received with nearly 90%

of the students considering them essential for their

learning progress. Approximately 70% responded

that the combination of illustrations and audio greatly

improved their understanding and helped them to bet-

ter remember the content.

Overall 64% of the students are convinced that

they have learned more by using the tablets than they

would have in ordinary classes. And nearly 90%

would like to continue self-learning with the devices

at home, e.g. for exam preparation.

The feedback we received from teachers was very

positive and even older teachers handled the tablets

proﬁciently after a short training. Teachers also

pointed out that short video tutorials as often used in

online learning, e.g. (Khan, 2006) provided consider-

ably less learning incentives and students very much

preferred interactive lessons.

6 CONCLUSIONS

Based on our observations, we truly believe that, if

done right, tablets can vastly improve the process of

learning and in particular enable students to better

learn for themselves. In this area traditional paper-

based books are certainly not optimal.

Our survey has shown that tablets are accepted by

students. They feel more motivated and are convinced

to learn more effectively. The key, in our opinion, is

the appropriate presentation of the learning content.

The learning style proposed in this paper is designed

for tablet-based learning and focuses on touch-based

interaction and student motivation. Further analysis

of student responses will help us to iteratively deliver

better content.

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