photo by: John Young

Apple iPads sit on the library counter of Deerfield Elementary School's newly renovated media library center, Sept. 28, 2016.

When Olive Minor had to give a report to her third grade class at Pinckney Elementary last year, she didn’t sit down and write it out — and she didn’t stand before her class to lecture on what she’d learned.

Instead, she made a movie. On an iPad.

“I used iMovie once to create a documentary,” said Olive, 9, who enters fourth grade this fall. “We had to do a small documentary on a state. It was only two minutes.”

Students entering Lawrence public schools this fall do so amid a technological transition unique in the district’s history. Each student in the city’s middle schools had access to an iPad last fall; this year, every high school student will be issued a MacBook.

If the massive adoption of technology is meant to get students ready for the 21st-century workplace they’ll inhabit, it’s also posed some challenges:

• Teachers have had to learn how to teach using the machines.

• Students have been expected to learn “digital citizenship” — how to use the iPads for learning, and not just for fun.

• And officials have had to come up with creative ways to erase the “digital divide” between families that have Internet access at home and those who need help affording the service.

Hovering over all of this is the question of whether newfangled technology is really any better than tried-and-true teaching methods using blackboards and textbooks that the parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents of today’s students all experienced during their school years.

On that last point, at least, district officials say they’re aiming for balance.

“It’s not a silver bullet — it’s a tool,” said Jerri Kemble, the district’s assistant superintendent of leading, learning and technology. And she acknowledged: “Too much screen time is a drawback.”

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Transforming Lawrence schools into a tech hub hasn’t come cheap. The school board in 2016 approved buying 5,000 iPads for $3.2 million, then followed up this year with $2.8 million to purchase 4,000 MacBooks. (The laptops were chosen after a pilot program at the high schools let teachers and students weigh in after trying both tablets and computers.)

Implementation could have been a disaster: Los Angeles schools notoriously spent more than $1 billion on iPads for students in 2013, only to see the effort falter under training issues and other obstacles.

That hasn’t happened here.

“It’s going great,” Kemble said of the transition. “Teachers had a lot of training and are using them effectively.”

Kendra Metz, a 25-year teaching veteran and sixth-grade teacher at Southwest Middle School, was more cautious in her appraisal.

“I think there were definitely mixed reactions from teachers,” Metz said of the program’s first year in 2016-17. Some teachers were readier than others to use iPads “depending on their familiarity with things you could do in the classroom, depending on their familiarity with Apple products, and so on. There was definitely a big discrepancy.”

Kemble said “vanguard teams” were created in each school — a small group of teachers who learned directly from Apple instructors how to use the iPads in the classroom. Those teachers then turned around and shared their knowledge with colleagues.

“We went through and had a day where we had a sort of iPadpalooza, where we could teach students some of the educational apps they could use in class,” Metz said of an event that happened in the fall. “Some of the teachers who were less comfortable with using the iPad in class were able to see some of the things they could incorporate in teaching.”

There were other challenges. Making sure kids didn’t multitask (hello, Facebook!), for one. That was solved by changing classroom geography — many teachers have their desks in the back of the room now, to keep an eye on student screens — plus the adoption of instructional programs that give teachers limited control of student electronics during class time.

One other issue: In order to fulfill their potential, leaders like Kemble say, students have to be able to use their electronics after the school day ends — to watch a video lecture, say, or practice math problems on an app. But that’s a problem for students whose families can’t afford Internet service.

The district’s response was twofold. First, it got a grant to let students check out small devices from their school library to let them set up Internet hotspots at home, for free. And they steered families to everyoneon.org, a site that provides broadband service to low-income families for just $10 a month.

“I call it ‘no child left offline,'” Kemble said. “I think the digital divide is a civil rights issue.”

Metz agreed, noting that every kid in her class — rich or poor — has the same machine. “I really feel like that’s leveled the playing field for a lot of students,” she said.

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The big question: Do these machines help kids learn?

Olive Minor thinks so. Yes, there’s the risk of distraction — a fun web page, or an app like Instagram — but she suggested it’s no worse than when a lecturing teacher strays off topic. The big drawback, she said, is that some learning sites are ad-driven — trying to sell kids shampoo, say, when they should be working on multiplication.

The technology is also useful for beginning readers, she said.

“Sometimes you click on a word and then it comes up with the different definitions and a translation,” Olive said. “In a book you can’t do that.”

There have been few studies on iPads in the classroom, and those that have been completed have returned mixed results. One 2013 study suggested that paper helped students learn and retain better than screens, but conceded that paper’s advantage was small.

Metz, at least, says the tech is useful for getting her students to collaborate.

“When we use the iPad in those ways — to help kids work together on a project — things seem to go smoothly; they seem to learn more,” she said.

And Kemble points out that students will eventually graduate into a world where proficiency with computers and tablets is expected in the workplace. “It is the world that we live in, that we need to prepare our students for,” she said. “It’s where the information is.”

Still, she added, there are times in the classroom when the screens need to turn off.

“We still need to communicate with others and learn to speak with them in person,” Kemble said. “There are some times when a sticky note is the right technology.”