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Sunday 8 February 2015

Paperless Drive

Our Eco Leader, Class Teacher Miss Kirsty Gallagher, has been given an iPad Mini to support our Eco ambitions to drive forward waste reduction by becoming as paperfree as we can. Miss Gallagher is also keen to be one of our pathfinders in adopting City of Edinburgh's cloud based provision for Edinburgh schools via Microsoft 365.

BT currently provide and service laptops for staff use. Now that City of Edinburgh's Digital Learning Team has put in place an infrastructure that has enabled schools to work wirelessly, we are keen to explore how a move towards providing iPads for staff might afford us greater flexibility and longer term financial savings.

iPads for Support for Learning Department

In October 2014 we were able to provide a number of iPad Minis to be used to support individual pupils with additional needs, deployed by our Support for Learning Team Mrs Carol Brechin and Ms Rhona Kennedy.

1:1 in P6

Our ambition for many years has been to establish 1:1 in each of our three P6 and P7 classes. In October 2014, with the support of Sciennes Parent Council,  we purchased a set of iPad Minis for personal 1:1 use in Ms Wendy French's P6 class. Ms French has been a champion and pathfinder in using 1:1 and we are delighted the set has enabled her to continue developing her innovative learning and teaching with technology. We hope we may be able to provide an additional class set to be shared between the other two P6 classes and eventually to provide all the P6 children with a personal device. Mrs Fiona Barker kindly set up Ms French's class set using Cisco Meraki. Anna Mitchell from the Digital Learning Team provided us with some excellent personal training and advice in school which has helped us further improve our procedures.

1:1 in P7

All three of our Primary Seven classes were issued with an iPad for personal use in school in October 2014 and we aim to allow home use by the end of February. We updated our remote management settings - using Cisco's Meraki - and purchased new, more robust cases (designed to protect corners) for two of the three sets. Mrs Fiona Barker's expertise - as an honours graduate in Computer Science - as well as her logical mind, have really helped refine and improve our procedures.

iPads in P2

We introduced a class set of iPad Minis to the Infant Department in 2013-2014 and began using them 1:1 in a class of Primary Two pupils with Principal Teacher Ms Shona Pearmain. School use only, not home use, and we do not intend to send this set home at any point in the future. Mrs Barker's P7 class buddied with the younger children on several occasions to assist them last year.

We have rethought our approach, after listening to Class Teachers, and are now seeking to use the set more flexibly for group and pair work, rather than 1:1 whole class. In 2014-2015 free Apps selected by this year's P2 team of four Class Teachers have been installed and a more flexible approach is being used when deploying them within the three P2 classes.