BYOD: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I stumbled upon this article a few days ago. It is something of a counter example to the benefit of technology in the classroom: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/technology/at-waldorf-school-in-silicon-valley-technology-can-wait.html

You may have seen this or a similar article before. There are quite of few of them out there, but it is about a group of private schools which advocates the absence of technology for children until the reach eighth grade. Then it is only to be used sparingly at home.

I don't agree with the logic, especially since most of the students attending these schools are from privileged families, and will have ample opportunities to learn to use technology properly as they grow. Whereas, many of the public school students with whom I interact daily learn at an early age to use technology for entertainment and consumption. More and more this is where personal electronic devices are marketed. Tablets and smartphones have great potential to be used for production and creative expression, but generally they are built to help us efficiently consume.

One of the biggest mistakes that we are making with technology and young children is that we are teaching them to be consumers rather than producers. BYOD give us the opportunity to teach children that their laptops, tablets, and smartphones can be used for more than just playing games, watching movies, and listening to music. Concepts that children who attend Walden schools will likely have little difficulty embracing later in life.

Where educators may fail, unfortunately I already see many who do, is that we will market BYOD as a way to "have fun" with learning. Learning can be engaging, entertaining, fun, interesting, and exciting with or without technology. Sometimes the topic won't interest a student and it probably won't be fun... Using interesting tools, apps, and software with a goal in mind, or challenging students to find a way to produce a final product can be fun, but assigning a list of questions to be answered with Web sites may seem like more fun than a paper and pencil worksheet, but it accomplishes no more than a work sheet would have and has the added benefit of allowing students to disconnect even more because instead of reading and taking notes, now they just watch the video, pause, rewind, playback when they get distracted. On top of that there is very limited peer engagement.

Building scavenger (QR) hunts, making recap pod and vodcasts, creating instructional presentations, and other teacher produced materials are a great way to engage students and convey information, but that is just technology in the classroom 1.0. It has been around for years, and still just teaches students to consume. Classroom Tech 2.0 is engaging students through production. They create the vodcasts and scavenger hunts based on research. Students should be able to put together a legitimate portfolio of their work by the end of a good course. I'm going to go one step further here as well and talk about Classroom Tech 3.0 (maybe it should just be 2.1), where students collaborate to produce some of their final products. This is not a new concept I know, but it seems to me that it is overlooked in many classrooms. Maybe that is because it gets noisy, and often looks somewhat disorganized. There are two ways that you can know for certain though that it is working.1. Are the final products better than anything that an individual would have produced on his or her own? This may not happen the first time around, but should start as student grow accustomed to collaboration. 2. Does the conversation alway circle back to making the final product better? We all get off topic when working with others. Most of us get distracted when working alone, but sometimes those tangents produce out-of-the-box ideas or help us consider alternative approaches. Either way, the process leads back to improving the final product.

Properly implement BYOD can be a boon to learning both in and out of the classroom. We can teach our children to use technology to further their love of learning, and to be more productive, but be careful to take time to disconnect. Do it the "old fashioned" way once in awhile, and be mindful of the potential for falling into the "electronic babysitter" trap that has been associated with television for years. Whether or not we use technology in the classroom is not the point. Hands on, interactive, student-centered learning has always been effective. Disengaged students won't learn by watching a movie, filling out a worksheet, completing a Web quest. Many activities have a place in an effective classroom. Sometimes we need to memorized facts and figures, sometimes we need activities which simply reinforce a basic process, but we also need to be challenged and to have the opportunity to try, fail, overcome, and create.

Getting Our Feet Wet

So we're in the final stages of planning for Bring Your Own Device/Technology (BYOD/T) for the school. Things are well underway, and we are preparing professional development for teachers. They won't be required to participate in BYOD or the PD, but I hope they will. We have some super teachers here and I think that proper application of technology can make their classrooms more exciting and will help students learn skills which will benefit them as they continue into careers and higher education.

We began a little over a year ago discussing how BYOD might impact our school division. At the time we were revising the Code of Conduct, which had prohibited all cell phone use or possession during school hours. This was a policy written several years prior in reaction to complaints that cell phone use during school hours was becoming prolific and teachers felt that little was being done to restrict it. Many felt that cell phones were a disruption to the instructional environment. Discipline for cell phone use skyrocketed after this policy went into place, but actual use became much less prevalent. Since that time, technology has evolved greatly. Android and iOS were in their infancy. RIM and Palm were the only options for so-called smart devices or PDA, and they had not ventured anywhere near education. I was on the no cell phones side of the debate, and honestly there wasn't much resistance. Most staff and parents were tired of their children's attachment, both physical and psychological, their mobile phones.

Last year, we re-evaluated that policy, and modified it to allow the use of mobile devices sans their network connections, wired or wireless. We considered that we are not longer referring to only phones. We also considered that there is a time and place for every tool and as educators we should be part of teaching our children what is and what is not an appropriate time and place for mobile devices. Now we press forward into BYOD.

We will open our wireless, but not wired, network to student and staff mobile devices beginning this fall. We have upgraded our infrastructure, met with teachers, administrators, students, and parents, put together training, and carefully considered the consequences both intended and unintended. We believe we are ready, but we won't really know for sure until well into the 2013 - 2014 school year.