All full-time freshmen at Briar Cliff University in Sioux City will be getting i-Pads this fall. Steve Janowiak, Briar Cliff’s vice president of student development, says the I-Pad offers several encouraging pathways.
Janowiak says those include classroom and curricular-based pathways, along with co-curricular and extra-curricular pathways, as students learn to better manage time, information and communication and develop their 21st century leadership skills. Janowiak says input from the professors and other teachers will be key in determining which classes will benefit most from i-Pad use.
The faculty members, many of whom teach freshmen courses, are helping to create a “pilot” this term so the program will be ready to roll out in the fall. Janowiak says tablets were picked for this expenditure instead of traditional notebook or laptop computers.
He says, “We chose to go with the iPad because we want our students to be working with leading edge technology, learning on technology we think is going to be more prevalent and common in the future.” Sara Thompson, a librarian at the school, says they decided on the Apple iPad for several reasons.
“But we are staying flexible and it might be a different tablet in the future,” Thompson says. “It’s more about helping the students be ready for that marketplace they’re going to go into when they graduate that will probably be on tablets, no matter what kind of industry they go into.”
Students will pay for the iPads through the general fees they pay in tuition. Briar Cliff interviewed other institutions around the nation before deciding to go with the tablets.
By Jerry Oster, WNAX, Yankton
