I usually confine my posts to educational and well researched material that I feel will be of benefit to parents and educators. But today I was educated beyond what any book could bring.

As a speech and language therapist, I work in a private school setting with privileged children, who come into contact with technology on a daily basis and take most of these luxuries for granted.

There is a new little boy in the school who has not been afforded the opportunity of a well structured pre-school learning environment. Although he speaks good English, his home language is not English and he lacks many of the underlying auditory perceptual and language skills that are necessary to cope in a Grade one classroom. And so, despite being afforded the opportunity of attending a private school from now onwards there are big gaps to close.

After seeing him for his first session today, he struggled with the rhyming task that we were doing and I told him that we would do one more example and then work on the iPad. “What’s an iPad?” he asked innocently. “That,” I said, pointing to the iPad on the desk. He looked at the device blankly, clearly having never seen one before.

If you google “what is an ipad?” the following definition comes up. “The iPad is a line of tablet computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., which runs on Apple’s iOS operating system. The first iPad was released on April 3, 2010; the most recent iPad models, the fourth-generation iPad and iPad Mini, were released on November 2, 2012. The user interface is built around the device’s multi-touch screen, including a virtual keyboard. The iPad has built-in Wi-Fi and, on some models, cellular connectivity.”

This definition tells you NOTHING about the magic that I saw the iPad perform.

I watched a little boy’s face light up. I watched him intuitively touch the screen in response to the instructions from “Reading Raven.” I saw a little boy who had no concept of letter sounds or letter formation, morph from an anxious and scared child drowning in a big school, into a proud, happy child with a sense of achievement as he earned the Reward stickers offered by Reading Raven.

And so if anyone had to ask me again “what is an iPad?” I would tell them

“it’s magic!”