9 IT Best Practices for BYOD Districts: Districts with Successful Bring Your Own Device Programs Share Their Key Strategies for Rolling out and Managing Student-Owned Devices in School
Bridget Mccrea · T.H.E. Journal Technological Horizons in Education · 2015
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Allowing students to bring their own devices into the classroom is a relatively new concept to many U.S. school districts. BYOD can help personalize learning by letting students work on devices that they are very familiar with, but it also creates some key challenges for the IT professionals who have to balance the need for computing power with the resources provided by 1 their districts. Here, a handful of district technology heads discuss their BYOD best practices suggest how others might adopt them. 1) Don't substitute a BYOD program for a 1-to-1 computing While the two concepts may seem similar from the CTO's perspective, lumping them together can be a mistake. According to Bob Gravina, CIO at Poway Unified School District in San Diego, We look at BYOD as an addition to our 1-to-1 initiative, not as a replacement for every student having access to a device while in school. 2) Invest in wireless networks the technology infrastructure to support them. Here's one instance the if you build it, they will come approach actually works. Gravina said, we saw the popularity of laptops mobile devices among students teachers, we started building out a network to be able to support those devices. That effort has been ongoing over the last 10 years at Poway USD, whose goal is to support three to four devices per student. To achieve that mission, the district built a robust wireless network invested in switches, access points other infrastructure components to support that network. You can't just put a lot of money into wireless without the bandwidth, or vice versa, said Gravina. You really need to do both. 3) Shoot for a K-12 BYOD When Meriden Public Schools (CT) wrapped up a successful six-week BYOD pilot in 2014, one of the first questions that came up was, Do we now roll this out to all students in grades K-12, or just some of them? Both Barbara Haeffner, director of curriculum instructional technology for the 9,000-student district, Superintendent Mark Benigni said they wanted a districtwide According to Benigni, We felt that even our K-5 pupils would benefit from the rollout, regardless of whether they were actively using devices daily in class. So while these younger students may not benefit as much from the BYOD as our secondary schools would, we wanted to send a message that they will in time. Haeffner said that simple message opened the door for elementary teachers to embrace some level of technology encourage students to bring devices into the classroom. We wanted to make sure that everyone saw this as a K-12 transition, she asserted, and not just as a secondary-school initiative. 4) Develop a robust cloud network that all stakeholders can use to access key materials applications. As part of its commitment to BYOD, Poway USD rolled out a single-sign-on, cloud-based portal from Stoneware that students, teachers, staff parents can access online on a 24/7 basis. Users can view attendance records, test scores, grades, homework, digital textbooks other materials in real time, according to Gravina. The portal also serves as an e-mail exchange enables single sign-on for Google Docs Khan Academy curriculum materials videos. It's both a private network a public cloud, said Gravina, where everyone can access all of their resources on a centralized platform. 5) Closely monitor your network's bandwidth. Centrally located in Poway USD's network operation center is a large monitor that allows Gravina his staff to keep tabs on the district's bandwidth usage. …