By Rebecca Gorelov ’14, Staff Writer

In April of 2010, the world’s first iPad was released. Less than a year later, this versatile device has begun to spread through schools as students and teachers have adopted it in place of a conventional laptop. Even at Newark Academy, teachers and students are starting to use the iPad in the classroom. According to Mr. Rollenhagen, NA Dean of Faculty and English teacher, “The iPad is [currently] being used in the classroom [and it] is in its experimental stage right now.” He explains how at the beginning of the 2010-2011 academic year, certain forward-thinking teachers received iPads with which to experiment and to see if they could incorporate them into their respective curricula.

One such teacher, Ms. Dixler of the Art Department, while tentative at first, started to experiment with the device and now claims that “it’s fabulous! It is a perfect portable sketchpad and it’s great for digital art.” Students in a Drawing class received iPads for an in-class project. One of these students, Freshman Maia Yoshida reflects how using “the iPad was different – in a good way.” According to Ms. Dixler, the iPad will be incorporated more extensively into the curriculum of the visual arts, especially in the realm of digital art.

In the Foreign Language Department, the iPad has also gained popularity. French teacher Mlle Obydol has started to incorporate the iPad into daily classes, using it in review games, vocabulary learning, and spelling exercises. She even plans to use the tablet for reading books used in class sometime in the future, as does Health teacher Mr. Gertler. Mlle Obydol strongly believes that there is a future for iPads in the classroom: “They are a novelty for the students and it is like each student has their own individual smart board.”

Mr. Rollenhagen has noticed how “certain students who use the iPad seem to be more organized, which ends up leading to better work.” Perhaps, as time progresses, more students will switch to using iPads, especially if they recognize what Freshman Emma Coffey has recognized: “I use [my iPad] all the time: from taking notes, to doing my homework, to reading my textbooks. It’s so much easier to have [these things] on one device rather than to carry [them] all around.” And as Sophomore Daniel Eatroff notes, “[my class]  had to look at a site on the internet and [the student with the iPad] was the first one to get to the site because everyone    else had to turn on laptops and wait.”

From the reading of books to the completion of projects, the iPad has become an influential part of daily life at Newark  Academy, and it is clear that it will become even more so over time. If students are able to lessen their  backpack load  from dozens of pounds-worth of textbooks to a small 2 pound item, the face of the typical NA classroom might look substantially different in the very near future. That is, as long as students (and teachers) remain focused on the academics and not the latest addictive ‘app.’