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This fall, all Warren JFK freshmen to get iPads
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
Compared with most schools that find it a challenge to adequately limit the amount of time their students use their electronic devices during class time, Warren John F. Kennedy High School will be thoroughly encouraging it next year.
Welcome to the age of the iPad.
This fall, every freshman entering the Catholic high school will be given one of Apple’s newest innovations to enable the student to participate in classroom lessons, do homework and just about anything else the student can imagine.
If the concept takes off, JFK could be a paperless “iSchool” by the end of the fourth year, said Brian Sinchak, school president.
That means all books and papers could be essentially eliminated in favor of all work being done on the iPad, he said.
“One of JFK’s goals is to be a technology leader,” Sinchak said, so last year the campus was equipped with the wireless Internet.
Over the last two years, each classroom was equipped with a SMART board, which is a white board that a person can draw on, display drawings and information on or use to pull information from the Internet.
“IPad technology makes it so easy for students to access information, and we want to be on the forefront of technological innovation,” Sinchak said.
“This is the world our students are living in,” he said of smartphones and other electronic gadgets that they use in their free time.
The iPad is about the size of one thin textbook, but it can access thousands of textbooks, novels, and computer programs (or “apps”) that give students interesting and easily understood ways of learning complex subjects, such as the anatomy of the human brain, or chemistry.
Bethany Woodley, a JFK senior, said she had the chance to try out a program called Math Tutor, and felt that it would be helpful for calculus or other difficult subjects.
One of her classmates, Michael Fredericka, said his father, an attorney, has used his iPad to look up case law and then take the iPad with him to court to re-access that information as needed.
“I look at it as a way to advance in education,” Fredericka said. “When you’re on a college campus, the first thing you see is a lot of kids on laptops. Now you’re seeing people on iPads. It’s a way to keep up with technology.”
Sinchak said the announcement a month or so ago that JFK was going to provide iPads to freshman has not gone unnoticed.
Applications for next year would suggest that the freshman class will grow by about 15 students, to about 75, Sinchak said.
The money for the iPads (about $500 each) comes from a fundraising effort, called the iKennedy Project, so students won’t pay extra to cover the cost.
Sinchak, who is 32 and a technology buff himself, says the iPad can bring education to life for some people in exciting new ways.
“Some of the programs are mind-blowing, and because students are so engaged by the technology, it will make them so much more involved in the learning process,” he said.