“iLife, supported by the right infrastructure, is simply amazing. Instead of focusing on the process, students are thinking about their content, and what’s appropriate for their audience.”
— Sheldon Bradshaw, Junior School Teacher, Western Academy of Beijing
Western Academy of Beijing:
An Ethos of Engaging and Creative Learning
An Ethos of Creativity and Always-on Learning
Not only does the WAB community benefit from its investments in technology infrastructure and human capital, but also from an investment in thoughtful environmental design. Each school section features an open help desk area, much like the Genius Bars found in Apple’s retail stores overseas. Students, teachers, or parents with support issues or creative challenges can visit a help desk and seek advice from the school’s well-versed support staff.
Equally important, WAB’s entire campus is designed to provide a comfortable, collaborative working environment that reflects the way the people work in the real world. All computer users work wirelessly on their notebooks in the many cafes and lounges located throughout the campus. From end to end, WAB encourages and supports learning in the style of the digital native.
Technology as a Means to a Meaningful End
WAB Teacher Sheldon Bradshaw is excited about the opportunities afforded by the technology to reach his students in new ways. “Talk about collaboration!” says Bradshaw. “Traditionally, you have one student on one computer, and he or she is off doing their own thing. But with a tool like Apple Remote Desktop, two kids in a group can see on their screens what the third is typing — or we can set them up with an interactive white board or a chat room — and they can all discuss the project and give their input.
“This gives us huge flexibility, in terms of how we group our students,” Bradshaw continues. “Now, teachers have the options we need to get the academic outcomes we want.”
iLife Empowers Students with Learning Differences
Bradshaw reports that his students regularly use iWeb to create online digital portfolios, which can then be shared with family members in their native countries. The other products in the iLife suite have made the production of multimedia projects fast, simple, and engaging for his students.
“iLife, supported by the right infrastructure, is simply amazing,” Bradshaw says. “A student can take an image, put it into iPhoto, and not think about it — it just happens. He or she can then create a podcast or instantly add some music with GarageBand, because it’s all integrated with iTunes. Instead of focusing on the process, students are thinking about their content, and what’s appropriate for their audience.”
“Where this will be especially interesting is with kids who have learning preferences that may be skewed to the visual, audio, or tactile, or who have writing issues,” adds Bradshaw. “Now these students can much more easily demonstrate their learning. I believe that giving them the Apple notebooks and the multimedia tools will make an enormous difference.”
New Teaching Paradigm Enhancing Traditions
In China, though traditions are highly valued, the Western Academy of Beijing is quietly turning centuries of teaching and learning on its ear. Students and their families couldn’t be more thrilled, and eagerly look forward to further technical innovation supported by Apple.
“Chinese has been taught the same way for 2000 years,” says Leicht. “Sure, there are innovators out there using traditional tools. But with an iPod that contains digital flash cards and podcasts, teaching that same class becomes a dynamic process. Students’ lessons are mobile, too: By going to the market with a vegetable character list their teacher prepared for them, students can interact with the world while studying Chinese. And that’s where the magic happens.”
