The first day of classes at the Philadelphia Performing Arts Charter School last fall was an exciting one.
“All 250 of the school’s sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders were gathered at its Broad and Oregon location. Each was presented with an iPad to use throughout the school year. ‘You could hear the shrieks for blocks,’ said Jason Corosanite,” Jonathan Takiff reports for The Philadelphia Daily News. “Clearly, it’s not every student who gets to start (as opposed to end) the school term with the chant ‘no more books.'”
“And there aren’t many schools that end the year — as PPAC is doing this week — with ‘tears in students’ eyes, because they don’t want to leave,’ said Corosanite, chief operating officer of the charter’s not-for-profit-umbrella organization, String Theory Schools,” Takiff reports. “Philadelphia Performing Arts Charter says it’s the first public middle school in the city to integrate iPads into education. More significantly, said Corosanite, is that the school was “one of the first, if not the very first middle school in the entire country” to entrust the tablets to students (albeit with a voucher signed by their parents) 24/ 7.”
Takiff reports, “The good news is that both the hardware and PPAC student body are ending the first pioneering school year with all A’s on their collective iPad report card… Come fall, the school will expand to another building across the street as it grows each grade from three sections to five. Also starting this fall, the String Theory School will also be taking over the underperforming Frankford-area H.R. Edmunds School. And it’s been given the mandate by the Philadelphia School Reform Commission to open a centrally located 1,400-student-capacity high school, building on PPAC’s Arts-plus-STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) curriculum model, in the fall of 2013.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “JayinDC” for the heads up.]