iPads for interaction

Students in the Faculty of Business have been using iPads to enhance their participation in taught sessions. During the class group presentations, which occupy several weeks in the course, the non presenting students have, in the past, tended to tune off into other activities instead of actively participating. In order to improve this iPads are distributed to students or groups of students at the beginning of each session. The non presenting groups are required to upload comments or questions about each student presentation into wiki. Once the presentation is over, the comments are then projected onto the large screen for everyone to see and for the speakers to address. To facilitate further thinking about the topic, the students can access the questions via Moodle.

The students actively participated and asked questions via wiki, however, this form of participation didn’t increase the involvement of students who are naturally quiet, as it was initially hoped. This form of asking questions was more suitable for some students than other as they commented:

“It’s more engaging to have iPads.”

“It’s easier to work on an iPad than on a laptop.”

“I do quite like to see the questions on the screen because I can always go back to something if I forget it.”

“It makes me organise myself better if I can see it and I can answer all of the questions”

“I’m kind of a shy person to talk in class even if I know or don’t understand so I could ask or answer the questions through using an iPad.”

Some students did say that they preferred asking questions verbally as they found typing distracting and couldn’t concentrate on what the presenter was saying.

One of the visible outcomes of such use of iPads, as pointed out by the lecturers involved, was the improvement in quality of the questions that were asked. Students had more time to think which resulted in questions being of greater depth.

Next steps:

So far wiki turned out to be quite a difficult tool to use for this activity but the facilitators are looking for a better tool that will give similar results and will not require setting up separate links for each project. Also, the next step is finding a more interactive way of using iPads for tutorials.

Equipment used: iPad Minis