“The iPod touch is a really motivational tool, empowering every child to explore his or her personal creativity and learning potential. It has done the most remarkable thing: removed the limits to learning.”
Showk Badat, Principal, Essa Academy, Bolton
Essa Academy: Empowering students with iPod touch
Children at Bolton’s new Essa Academy are achieving spectacular results, rolling back years of under achievement in their deprived community. The proportion of pupils with five or more A* to C grades in GCSE exams has risen from 55% to 99.5% in just two years. School inspectors say they have rarely seen such rapid improvement.
Essa’s Principal, Showk Badat, puts the iPod touch at the heart of the children’s success. “The iPod touch is a really motivational tool, empowering each child to explore his or her personal creativity and learning potential. It has done the most remarkable thing: removed the limits to learning”.
Essa Academy opened its doors in 2009 with a simple mission: all will succeed. It was an ambitious aim for an area more familiar with failure than success. Showk Badat has no illusions about the challenges facing his new state-funded independent academy. He grew up in this disadvantaged area of Lancashire, and understands the community and its issues.
“It was known for underachievement, and many of our young people were disenfranchised and unhappy”, he says. “There was under investment in staff and resources at the old school we replaced, and a crippling overspend in budget at the same time. Worst of all was a lack of confidence in children’s ability to succeed. If people don’t believe that children have potential, nobody bothers to question the education methods that are failing them”.
Essa Academy was a new type of school, able to attack the community’s longstanding problems with a distinctive and innovative education philosophy: let the children learn.
“Letting children learn means breaking down the barriers that stop them achieving the same success as children anywhere in the country”, explains Showk. “It means ending low teacher expectations, formed over decades. It means convincing children that the school and its teachers are here to help them realise their learning potential, not to fight them”.
Showk knew that the school needed dramatic new initiatives, fast, to change the culture of failure. It needed to convince parents, teachers – and most important, students themselves – that success really was an achievable goal for all. He set Director Abdul Chohan an urgent task: shape a radical new learning environment where pupils are given the power, confidence and freedom to learn and be creative according to their individual potential.
“We developed a new learning vision for the school”, explains Abdul. “We wanted each student to have a window on the world, and an ability to access information at any time. We wanted to support and deepen the learning process in the classroom, but also on the bus, and at home in the evenings and weekends. My job was to make that vision a reality”.
“We were focussed on learning, not technology”, he continues. “Technology had served us badly in the old school. It was passive, and often irrelevant to the learning process. We had no network in place across three school sites. We were carrying a massive budget deficit and had no capital for a big investment”.
After evaluating traditional technology solutions, Abdul followed a new line of research.
“We began to think about the whole idea from the student’s point of view. We looked at social networks and blogs. We discovered the consumer device world, and began to think about the potential that the iPod touch and the App Store could offer in learning, and how it could achieve what we wanted”.
The iPod touch was a bold gamble for a new school with immense learning problems. “We had to make a change and do it quickly”, says Showk. “We wanted a transformation in our learning, on a scale we hadn’t seen anywhere else in the UK. None of us really knew how well the iPod touch would work in the school. We put our faith in it, and left the rest to the creativity of our children and teachers”.
The school tested the iPod touch for three weeks with 20 pupils of 11 to 16, with mixed abilities and languages. The result exceeded Showk’s expectations. “Yes, of course they downloaded games, but they were also using subject-related podcasts, and they were personalising their learning in a way we had never seen before”.
One Polish student with poor English was using a Polish language version of Wikipedia to help her understand a science lesson in class. She would not have been able to understand that lesson before. The school would have removed her from the class for extra English tuition.
Products they use
iPod touch
This pocket computer is great for learning both inside and outside the classroom. Learn more about iPod touch
iPad
Apps they use
Children and teachers at Essa Academy use more than 100 apps on the iPod touch – most of them free. Children are also able to buy their own apps from the App Store, and the school has a small budget to support specialist app purchases.
Document To Go
It is an all-in-one application with support for iWork, Microsoft Office, PDFs, and other files and attachments. View in iTunes
iRevise
iRevise is the ultimate revision tool, containing 5 applications for organising and maximising study time. View in iTunes
Stanza
Reading interface with powerful library organisation features enables students to enjoy advantages of digital books. View in iTunes
