Hirakata City Board of Education
Japan
Confidence in the classroom.
Powered by iPad.
Nestled between the energy of Osaka and the serenity of Kyoto, Hirakata is quietly transforming the way its school district thinks about education. The family-friendly suburb is home to nearly 20,000 elementary and 10,000 junior high school students, and its educational goals are ambitious — to foster a culture of learning, connection, and opportunity while helping every student reach their full potential. To achieve these goals, the Hirakata City Board of Education provided every elementary and junior high school student with iPad. They say their students are now more confident, engaged, and enthusiastic.
Education today values original thoughts and the ability to learn from a variety of sources, with an emphasis on creativity and critical thinking. iPad enhances children’s learning experiences and makes school more enjoyable.
With the Board of Education’s decision to shift from knowledge-intensive learning to inquiry-based learning, educators were able to quickly achieve proficiency on iPad and transition their lessons accordingly. “iPad has significantly reduced the time teachers need to create materials for students, and it has also made it easier to present those materials,” said Tsuyoshi Ueda, principal of Higashi Kori Elementary School. “It allows them to dedicate more time to dive deeper into topics.” This has also increased motivation among teachers to use iPad more frequently and across more of their lessons.
Teachers now craft assignments that deepen learning and enable students to express their knowledge in a variety of ways. In a junior high school science class, students use models to simulate volcanic eruptions. They capture video on iPad and observe how variables in the lava’s chemical composition and viscosity can yield dramatically different results. Students review the footage to compare and contrast each example, capturing additional data each time. They then combine their footage in iMovie to create a video that details their hypotheses and conclusions.
In Japanese class, elementary school students use GarageBand to record musical accompaniment for well-known haikus. They choose instruments within GarageBand and record sounds from nature or hand-held instruments like drums or chimes using the microphone on iPad. Next, they record themselves reciting the haikus aloud and edit the audio to create a musical poem, which they then share with their peers on the classroom Apple TV. By asking students to think about, explore, and capture elements of the environment around them, this activity brings poetry to life in a tangible way and allows every student to share their unique perspective.
We focus not just on learning, but what lies beyond it — how students apply their knowledge and what they aspire to become. iPad serves as a reliable partner in this process — it enables students to turn their ideas into reality.
Not only do assignments like these help boost students’ confidence by enabling them to learn the material more quickly, they help students directly connect their learning to the world around them. This success is also reflected in the Board of Education’s data — a survey revealed that students who use iPad enjoy school more. And iPad is part of their daily lives — 100% of schools in Hirakata report that their students use iPad in class every day, and students can bring their iPad home with them each day as well.
Hirakata City Board of Education’s Curriculum Director, Giyu Nagayama, explains, “The joy of creating is a key element of well-being, contributing to self-actualization and self-affirmation. With the help of iPad, students can feel that joy. Observing their success, I can only imagine the sense of accomplishment and happiness they experience.”
