Why has New College gone down the Bring Your Own Technology (BYOT) route? An obvious factor is cost. But there’s also another, less prosaic reason...
If a school wishes to go down the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) route, what are the conditions necessary to make this possible in a useful (ie learning enhancing) and hassle-free way?
From my research into schools which have gone down this road, or at least started to, I have come to the conclusion that there are three at least three general conditions which have to be met.
Wildern School has partially implemented Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD. Students may bring their own devices in as long as the teacher and head of department concerned have agreed that phones and other devices would be useful in a particular lesson.
The unique challenge for the Children's Hospital School is balancing the need and desire to enable all long stay students to be able to access their own device with the need for security. Although this challenge is faced by other schools, the uniqueness in this case stems from the fact that 80% of the student population changes very frequently, so the school has little idea what devices students will be bringing.
What are the potential benefits and challenges of introducing a Bring Your Own Device policy into a secondary (high) school? In this, our latest case study, we look at the experience of The Arnewood School Academy in England.
You can describe what your school does with educational technology ad nauseum, but in my opinion nothing will bring it alive as much as a well-written case study.
The reason that case studies can be so effective is that they take just one aspect of what the school is doing, rather than trying to present the whole lot.
(c) Terry Freedman All Rights Reserved