As Jennie Wilson Elementary School first-grade teacher Amy Golay sees it, the possibilities are endless when it comes to ways to utilize an iPad in a classroom.
Golay is one of nine teachers in Garden City USD 457 schools who are participating in one of the seven K-8 technology pilot programs in the district.
Layne Schiffelbein, USD 457 instructional technology coordinator, said the district has been looking for ways to integrate technology in K-8. At the beginning of the spring 2017 semester, the pilot programs were implemented in various classrooms in schools throughout the district to determine the best implementation model.
Ronald Carver, a professor of education and psychology at the University of Missouri, proved in a landmark study of “brainiacs” in 1985 that, even for very practised speed readers, attempting to read above 600 words a minute meant that comprehension of any text fell below 75%, and went down dramatically as the reading speed increased beyond that. There is some evidence to show that we can, however, develop the ability to “fillet” a book quite quickly if we use adaptive techniques. In another study of the various techniques of “skimming”, two researchers at the University of Bath showed that skimmers who were most successful at extracting and retaining meaning were able to focus on critical sections of an argument and to jump forward as soon as the “rate at which they are gaining new information drops below a threshold”. They were particularly alive to bullshit or repetition.
Much of the buzz of our so-called digital overload comes from those latter growth industries. It has been argued that the subconscious mind can process 20,000,000 bits of information per second; but of those, the conscious mind holds on to only about 40 bits at any moment. Rather than trying to read more quickly we might be better advised to read more selectively. A lot of our lives can be scanned and scrolled and skipped, but reading remains a more immersive kind of act, dependent on detail. As Woody Allen observed: “I took a course in speed reading and was able to read War and Peace in 20 minutes. It’s about Russia.”
It was time to kick things up to the next level. I enlisted experts like Scotty Loveless, a former Apple Genius and iOS tech who told me this would not be another, “turn off every useful feature of iOS posts…” because those “really grind my gears.” Finally, someone speaking my language!
With that said, here’s how I finally beat the worst of my battery battles — and now you can, too.
Yet Apple's obsessive secrecy, coupled with the extreme demands it makes of its manufacturers and the competition to join their ranks, means its suppliers dare not put a foot wrong. Apple's patronage is a blessing when everything is going well but it can quickly become a curse. The consequences of a break-up can be devastating, as London-listed chip designer Imagination Technologies discovered this week.
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"The best thing is to do the deal with Apple anyway," says Mr Munster. "Even though you are probably going to get throttled in the end, you will have three years of great times you probably would never have had if you hadn't done it."