education – Tim Calvin

Thoughts on BYOD…

I had this revelation this morning, and thought I’d share. I was thinking about my district/school’s eventual move towards a BYOD environment. I’ve talked before about how I don’t think going from a non-1:1 environment to BYOD isn’t a functional reality, but I had always assumed that once that eventual shift was made, I’d be teaching in a school full of varied devices.

Now I’m thinking that’s not the case.

The realization I’ve come to is that a wide variety of devices being self-deployed in a High School is exceptionally unlikely because it would require the majority of my students to have an interest in discovering the device that works best for them. Given my experience this year, and with High School students on the whole I can say this with certainty: That will never happen.

Functioning in High School isn’t about standing out as an individual and making independent choices. High School, for the vast majority of students, is about blending into the crowd. It’s about having the exact same shoes/jeans/fleece that everyone else has.

Beyond that substantial hurdle to clear, there’s this fact to go along with it: people deeply interested in tech will always be a minority. While the people reading this blog might care about tech, the majority of people don’t want to think about the intricacies of that tech- they just want it to work. That that same sort of dynamic exists in high school. Most of my students don’t really care what specific cell phone they have- they just need it to do what they want. Ditto with computers- they want to be able to see the web, check email, message, skype, and the like. That’s it- they’re not really into caring about the display tech or the wireless chipset the maker is using.

I’d guess that in a true BYOD situation, you’d end up with two or maybe three major options being brought, with a small percentage of technophiles/early adopters rounding out a few, other, more obscure options.

Anyway.

Backlash.

Not a surprise, really, but there’s been some. Mostly in response to our 1:1 move, more of it in response to our choice to use iPad2’s as our only devices. Not that I feel all of the criticism deserves a response, but I thought a couple of words would be fitting. Here goes.

1. Clearly, 1:1 is no silver bullet for education. Josh Davis, also known as Dj Shadow, has said in more than a few interviews an interesting idea: He states that digging (the act of digging through stacks of old vinyl records in search of rare/unknown/unused gems) won’t, in fact, make a bad Dj good. But it will make a good Dj better, he insists. If a school culture is backwards and broken, 1:1 won’t make it any better or less dysfunctional. If you have a forward thinking, progressive, experimentally inclined staff, 1:1 can facilitate bringing that to new and fertile grounds.

2. The choice that we made to insist on every student carrying an iPad2 was, I firmly believe, the right choice for our school at that time. That doesn’t make it the right choice for your school, or even the right choice for our school in a year or two when it’s time to replace that fleet of devices. We’ve made no promises that our program will forever be a iPad specific one. In fact, our original plan was this: Use the iPad2’s as transitional devices from our (at the time) existing environment to our new (and current) 1:1 environment. We thought (and I still stand by this) that going from nothing in the school to everyone-with-a-different-device would be too large a gap for both staff and students to manage without a massive backlash of frustration. Everyone on the same device simplified this transitional phase. It is by no means a long-term solution.

3. We plan to use this transitional phase on our way to being a BYOD environment. I’d love to have every student/staff/parent well-informed enough to be able to choose a reasonable device for their use in the school. The barrier here is in education, but not just of the students, but also of the parents and the surrounding community. The iPad2’s should serve as a entry point to show the usefulness of this sort of technology integration- the hope is that with some buy-in from parents and the community, students and parents will be more motivated and empowered to research and explore their own options in hardware for students. That’s where we want to be going.

Yes, it would have been nice to simply tell every student and parent that they needed to buy a device for this school year. But the reality is that our program is experimental, and we need to be willing and able to fund it ourselves as a proof-of-concept. Having a wide variety of devices in a school is a great thing; it’s not feasible to go from no devices to such an environment. Our iPads merely mind that gap.

Not to sound too angry, because I’m not. Just emphatic.

Assembly Lines are Great for Cars…

…but not for students.

The idea that it takes each and ever student four years to get through High School is deeply flawed. The idea that every student needs to sit in a classroom for 990 hours a year is also flawed. And both of these flaws are based on the same mistake:
That all students are the same.

We know this isn’t true.

We know this because we have ed plans. And 504’s. And tutoring. And leveled classes. And AP classes. And night school. And summer school.
All things designed to put flexibility back into a rigid system.

Why don’t we stop putting bandaids on this gaping wound, and address the problem itself:

The system needs to be based on flexibility.

Why don’t we run things on a credit based system? You need (x) credits to graduate from High School. They need to be in the following distribution. If that takes you 5 years, that’s just fine. If it takes you 2.5, that’s ok too. If you’d rather take classes during the summer to speed things up, we’ll offer those. If you want to take a semester off to do an internship, that’s great; we might even grant you some credit.

Kids aren’t all the same, and treating them like they all need the same schedule does them a disservice.