The Schulzentrum Efringen-Kirchen, a primary and secondary school in the very Southwest of Germany with about 770 pupils and students, is planning to teach with tablets. Vice principal and MICOOL team member Frank Hofmaier is deeply convinced that tablets will enrich nowadays teaching. “But on the other hand, as a member of the school management team, I must be sure that this investion is worth the money and the technical effort for the whole school”, Frank Hofmaier says.
So the school decided to do a “pilot phase”. With the support of the KMZ (media center) Lörrach – also a partner in the MICOOL project – the school received useful technical information and could rent a package of tablets for two weeks.
Cornelia Rieger, English teacher at Schulzentrum Efringen-Kirchen, made a project in class 7 using the app “book creator”. Pupils made an ebook “Me and my friends” containing, texts, videos and audio files. “The students were highly motivated”, she says “ and the best thing is that they wanted to have a good ebook, so they practiced again and again and finally achieved impressive results”. The work with audio or video on tablets gives an immediate feedback, and students were proud of presenting their ebooks.
Frank Hofmaier made his first experience with the app “explain everything” in class. Teaching or learning basic terms of economics in class 9 is, of course, not always fun and effective for teachers and students. But in this lesson, students were highly motivated to first research about “gross and net” or the question “Why do Swiss people get green formulars after shopping in Germany?” and later to explain the issue with “explain everything”. Besides the motivation, this is an ideal learning situation: Once students can explain and visualize complex content, they really got it into their brains. So, the pilot week was successful. Students and teachers were impressed by the benefits of teaching with tablets: Motivation, cooperative aspects, direct feedback, and last but not least the numerous advantages in the field of individualized learning.
