“The iPad may prove to be a useful tool to put in the hands of cyber school students,” said Dr. Nick Trombetta, CEO and founder of the 9,000-student Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School.

Dr. Trombetta attended the Apple Education Leadership Summit 2010 in Dallas, Texas, April 21-23.

“We attended the summit to begin a conversation with Apple about educational uses for the iPad,” said Dr. Trombetta. PA Cyber administrators have begun to experiment with the iPad and to look at apps – customized applications – that could put educational resources literally at a student’s fingertips. No iPads have yet been placed with students.

PA Cyber is uniquely positioned to experiment with the iPad because the school’s size, flexibility, experience and culture allows it to adapt more quickly than traditional schools to new educational methods and advances in technology, said Dr. Trombetta.

Dr. Trombetta said PA Cyber, like Apple, is a leader and innovator. The first statewide K-12 public cyber charter school in Pennsylvania, PA Cyber in its 10 years of existence has pioneered online educational methods, systems and the use of new technology. For instance, the school has converted nearly 100 percent to customized consumable textbooks that students keep, saving staff time and shipping expense while encouraging textbook content to be continually updated.

Downloadable digital versions of textbooks for more than 150 PA Cyber online courses – about two-thirds of the school’s course catalog – already have been created, though at this time PA Cyber has chosen to continue providing printed textbooks, according to Dr. Trombetta. Downloadable to a student laptop computer or mobile devices such as the iPad, digital versions of both custom and standard textbooks are available through arrangements such as per-student license agreements with publishers.

“The iPad already contains a lot of the technology we use now to deliver instruction, along with other innovative features which could help students to learn,” said Dr. Trombetta. He said PA Cyber staff will meet soon with Apple representatives to continue the school’s look at the iPad.