Teaching With Tablets, Book Review

ACSD has released a great series of books, their Arias series. These are short, texts that run about 50 pages on paper, the busy teacher's version of a chapter book. There are four in the series and the first I read was Teaching With Tablets by Nancy Frey, Doug Fisher and Alex Gonzalez. My school ordered one of each of the first four titles, and a copy of each was provided to me for review.

The book is a great text for any teacher who will be teaching in a 1:1 environment for the first time. Although the text is short, they don't skimp on the fundamentals. The authors clearly develop a model of what teachers can do with tablets. The bulk of the book is dedicated to discussing tools such as Nearpod which allow a teacher to receive individual feedback from each student via their tablet in real time.

As a tech integration coach, I appreciate the focus on synchronous guided instruction with the tablet because this is the "game changer" use case. Most of the teachers I work with are just beginning to see the tablet as a way for student to have real time access to all their work via google drive and they have not yet begun to explore tools such as Nearpod and socrative.

This quick book even has some resources in the back. Now that I have read it I will be asking the teachers on my campus to read it. Since it is so brief, I wont feel like I am imposing on them unfairly.

Overall the book feels about as informative as a great conference session that is 1.5 hours long. I will have to dig around, but it seems like there should be some sort of companion resource including a slide deck of screenshots.