Digital Leaders are the Apple of Tech Officer’s Eye

Two students from Howard Junior School, Norfolk’s Apple Regional Training Centre, recently enrolled on and successfully completed the Apple Teacher training scheme.

Apple Teacher is designed to support and celebrate practitioners who embed Apple technology in to their teaching, something which Howard Junior School has excelled at for years. By completing the Apple Teacher scheme, over 75% of our teaching staff have gained accreditation from Apple; in recognition of their skills with using iPads to accelerate and redefine learning. For several years now, Howard Junior have deployed a 1:1 iPad scheme for all students, leading to accelerated student progress in the classroom - particularly in English and Maths.

As part of ensuring that there is a high level of quality for lesson delivery and technical support, every year Howard Junior appoints and trains a group of students as ‘Digital Leaders’. These students demonstrate a high level of aptitude and technical knowledge for their age range and are able to act as first-line support in the classroom.

The Digital Support Officer for the Apollo Academies Trust - of which Howard Junior is a member - Lee McCowen, completed the initial Apple Teacher course, as well as gaining further recognition in Swift coding and was eager to use the experience to improve the classroom experience for all. After seeing no reason that students could not participate in the course, he contacted Apple’s education department and asked if he could enrol a select group of students on to the course.

The first two volunteers, Marcio and Tommy from year six, enrolled on and completed the iPad course within 2 hours; demonstrating not only a high level of knowledge of the iPad itself, but also how to use multiple apps in one workflow in order to achieve transformative learning opportunities.

We are very proud that two of our students are potentially the first anywhere to achieve this accreditation and we look forward to offering the opportunity to more of our Digital Leaders in the near future so that they can be instrumental in developing and improving the learning for themselves and their peers.