BYOD and 1:1

There's been a lot of nonsense about mobile device provision in schools talked in recent weeks. The South African Heads of Independent Schools Association  conference held recently appeared to have a very one sided exposure to this debate. Here is my take on this issue, gleaned from many years of working with both 1:1 provision of netbooks and tablet devices, as well as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) following wifi provision in schools. I think it is necessary to have this experience of both forms of device provision before forming an opinion. I have, and my view is that there has to be a 'meld' between the two.

The fact is that funding and rolling out 1:1 provision of one particular device is very easy in a very small school where there might only be a hundred or so kids, as is the management of the devices,  however, I've worked with schools where just one year group had double that number and it is this 'scalability' factor which appears to have been ignored in the conversations about 1:1 roll outs. Also, device suitability will almost certainly change with age. Whilst iPads and iPad Minis's might well be fine for younger kids, older pupils might prefer the familiarity of the Windows 8 mobile platform with its Office productivity suite. This means that a variety of devices might well be used in a school of over 1000 students. Android is making inroads into education territory previously inhabited solely by Apple. Some of the comments on Twitter I read about homogeneity being the most suitable approach to mobile device provision were quite concerning when made without the experience to backup that particular paradigm. We limit ourselves to one particular platform or device type at our peril....in my experience.
Tablet Academy Africa, launching in January next year will be completely platform agnostic, with advice given to schools on the various possibilities open to them across all platforms and devices.

And as to BYOD, this is in fact, already the reality in many schools particularly with the increasing ownership of smartphones and tablets by students. We would be foolish not to use this computing power in education. Yes, it does throw up issues of teacher workload (planning may well be more detailed) but also brings the advantage of using students as digital leaders in the classroom, which takes much of the responsibility away from the teacher over use of the technology. The wider psycho-pedagogical issues around teachers giving up 'control' in the classroom also swirl around BYOD, but as the prevalent reality, we must grasp this and run with it. Unless schools provide the same facilities as nearly every other place our students encounter in their daily lives,they will continue to mark themselves out as increasingly irrelevant to education,which is becoming increasingly informal. Wifi is becoming as essential to education in this century as textbooks were in the last.

 It comes to something when you can use your mobile device in the Mug and Bean but not in your school...