Tech-Infused Education: Transforming Teaching and Learning at Mulhacen Bilingual School with Goodnotes
Through the integration of Goodnotes in a 1:1 iPad program, Mulhacen Bilingual School prepares students for a technology-driven future.
Sitting on the edge of the beautiful city of Granada, Spain, Mulhacen Bilingual School is a K-12 provision setting out to ensure that its students are fully engaged and ready for their next steps, either as students at university, as global citizens embarking on a gap year overseas or launching directly into the world of work. The focus of the senior leadership team there is to empower young learners, not only to be as well prepared as possible for the future, but making sure that they are able to use technology efficiently and effectively. The leaders at Mulhacen understand that technology is likely to play a big role in the job markets of the future, and they are doing a fantastic job of prioritising best-practice, and making that front and centre of their learning.
Exploring new technology to empower learners
Back in October 2023, a group of students from Mulhacen visited the Goodnotes office in London. The reason for their visit was to find out more about how Goodnotes operates as a company and to discover more about the people behind the app. This was significant to both the staff and to the students who attended this visit because they use Goodnotes every day at school across a phenomenally broad range of subjects. During that visit to London, students talked about the various ways that they use Goodnotes in subjects as divergent as physical education and mathematics, to geography and art. Once the group had left our offices, we wanted to find out more about what happens back on campus.
Transforming teaching and learning with Goodnotes
For this reason, we interviewed students from a range of different year groups, staff from a number of different subjects, as well as leaders from the school to learn about how the Mulhacen community is using Goodnotes and what impact it is having on teaching and learning in the classroom. One thing that resonated, particularly on the teachers’ side, was how transformational the app has been for them in their day-to-day workload. José María de Andrés, a Philosophy Teacher at Mulhacen, said,
I have been working with iPad for so many years, it was a dream to find an app like this that had almost everything one is looking for to teach and for students to learn.
Fernando Ruiz, a Latin Teacher, added, “I am one of the teachers who has been using the iPad for the longest time at school and I think that having an app like this makes our work much easier.”
Organisational benefits: Streamlining workflows and enhancing collaboration for both teachers and students
Our task was to find out how this is being achieved and, most importantly, to find out how Mulhacen is using Goodnotes effectively. When we spoke with Ignacio, a Grade 7 student, he told us that “mostly, I use Goodnotes for philosophy class, where it's really helpful for writing long form pieces and making them colourful and interesting to look back at. In Math, it's also very useful because I can combine all my notes and search them instead of flipping through 200 pages of an exercise book. I also use Goodnotes for language studies, mostly for grammatical work and for transcribing sentences, but also for recording the audio. I find it especially useful for projects and presentations because it’s easier to organise my work.”
This is a theme that we kept coming back to; how students and teachers were able to organise content in a way that both groups could easily navigate what they were working on. The majority of teachers at Mulhacen talked about the value of having an experience that feels similar to pen and paper, but all of them talked about workflow and organisation. Some students, such as Carlos, talked about how they use Goodnotes both in and out of school because of the organisational nature of the app:
Cost and environmental savings: Going paperless with Goodnotes
For teachers at Mulhacen, when they are planning their work, many of them are taking Goodnotes into consideration right from the early stages of their thinking. For instance, Mr Isaac Juguera, a Mathematics teacher, mentioned that “when it comes to thinking about what I can do for a class, I am interested in two questions: The first one is how quickly and effectively can I distribute the exercises? The second one is: how can I waste less paper?” In both cases, the teacher pointed out that Goodnotes is able to help, both from an administrative and an environmental perspective. Mr Pablo Gross, a History teacher at Mulhacen, agrees:
While teachers are able to make use of the functionality and there is a reduction in cost for printing and printed physical resources, students like Pablo talked about how they are also able to save on the amount of stationary and equipment they might need. “For me, Goodnotes is helpful because it brings all the tools you need into one place. Not like regular notebooks, it allows you to combine various materials without the need for extra things. It's easier for me and my classmates to use than having to buy everything and keep it in a [pencil] case. We've tried the other apps for this, but they aren't as easy to use for what we need in the class.”
1:1 iPads and Goodnotes: A key system for teaching and learning
With Mulhacen’s vision for ensuring that their students are primed for adopting tech solutions in their learning and in their work, there was a clear focus on the value of the iPad specifically. The school has made a strategic choice to focus on the iPad, which is made available as a 1:1 device, because of how practical it is in accommodating so many different subject areas. Mr Pablo Gross, acknowledges that this may not be possible for every school, but for Mulhacen, it’s the best option.
Knowing that Goodnotes on the iPad is making such a huge difference to Mulhacen gives us the confidence to know we are helping schools achieve the high aspirations for their learners while it’s also allowing us to engage and co-create with schools better than ever before. Mulhacen is planning another visit to our London office later this year, where we hope to share even more about our plans for the future, while also learning from their teachers and students about ways that we can continue building for the next generation.