BYOD Case Study: Archbishop Lanfranc School

Phone LaseredThe school is moving towards a totally cloud-based system using mostly mobile technology. Therefore BYOD will become another facet of this by allowing students to use mobiles when appropriate, in addition to the kit provided by the school.
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BYOD: What’s in a name?

Hand Holding a Mobile PhoneWhen I started to look at the whole Bring our Own Device phenomenon, I thought it was all pretty simple. Mal Lee and EdFutures have drawn a distinction between BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and BYOT (Bring our Own Technology). These are helpful, but unfortunately things ain’t that simple.

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What are the features of a good ICT activity?

Risk FactoryI was invited to give a talk recently, and one of the questions I was asked to address was: what are the characteristics of a good ICT activity? This is one of the questions which, at first glance, seems really easy to answer – until you get down to thinking about it. Because what the question is really asking, I think, is what makes a good ICT activity good in a unique way: that is, unique to ICT.

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BYOT Case Study: Scargill Junior School

RaptDescribing itself as being on the ‘networked’ stage of the continuum, Scargill school’s current Bring Your Own Technology model consists of utilising a wide range of mobile devices in school in order to enhance and support the learning in the classroom. It started with Nintendos approximately 6 years ago. But what prompted Scargill to consider a BYOT approach in the first place?
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BYOT: the policy that dare not speak its name?

CIA Secret Weapon, after Otto MessmerA couple of months ago Mike Sharples, a researcher at the Open University, told me that he had looked at the websites of some of the schools I was writing up case studies on in connection with their Bring Your Own Technology policy, but was unable to find any references to it whatsoever. He came to the conclusion that:

BYOT is the policy that dare not speak its name.

I have to say that although there are quite a few schools adopting a BYOT approach, finding them has not been easy.

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Bring your own thinking

cell phone 2A few years ago I said to one of my team, having been in the new management post for about a week, “How come nobody here ever takes a decision? How come they always ask me what they should do, especially when they know more about their specialist area than I do?”

“Because”, came the reply, “Our last boss always had an opinion on everything, and stuck to it whatever anyone else suggested. So we very soon learnt that there was no point in doing any of the thinking for ourselves.”

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Mobile phones in education revisited

cell phoneThe most popular article on the ICT in Education website is one by a 17 year-old student called The Importance Of Mobile Phones In Education. To give you an idea of its popularity, I would estimate that it has been viewed at least 30,000 times since it was published back in July 2010. So the question is, why is it so popular?

Is it because it was written by a student? Well, there is no doubt that student articles receive a lot of attention, but not usually this much.

Is it because it is about mobile phones? I don’t think so: I have written about mobile phones before, and again, the articles haven’t attracted 30,000 views as far as I know.

I think the answer lies in the combination: an article about mobile phones written by a student who appears to be surgically attached to one.

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Report on the Mobile Learning conference

By Susan Banister Susan Banister @susanbanister

Learning through mobile technology is not a new concept. But as yet it has not been taken up by huge numbers of schools. Mobile technology means more than smartphones. It includes iPads, iPods, netbooks, e-readers, Nintendo DS's, GPS devices. The Curriculum ICT team at Bradford in the UK teamed up with its City Learning Centres and embraced mobile learning head on with their bMobLe project (short for Bradford mobile learning).

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