Preparing for BYOD

Tomorrow, I will have the opportunity to discuss BYOD and all that it means in our educational environment with a group of colleagues, several of which I consider good friends.   I respect the knowledge of these fellow technology directors and look forward to our discussions.   While watching the nightly news, I began to reflect on the past year and the steps taken in MY school system in the area of BYOD and digital devices in general.  The result of this mental process was this blog post.

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is an opportunity to provide students with personal devices but as with all technologies in the educational environment must be "planned for" and can not be implemented successfully without involving the IT staff, the administration, teachers, parents, and students. Many teachers will welcome professional development on everything from integration ideas for mobile devices in the classroom to new strategies for classroom management. It is important to communicate guidelines to both parents and students and discuss realistic expectations for supervision of students using personal devices on school campuses.

In many school districts, there must be policy changes before students are allowed to use personal mobile devices at school. What about the liability for the device if it is damaged or lost on school grounds? How much responsibility should the IT staff have for the "set-up" of these devices? Is the wireless infrastructure designed to accommodate these devices and the district or school owned devices? What about devices with 3G/4G capabilities and filtering? How important is printing if we are trying to go green?

To begin this conversation, I will attempt to give you a reference point for where my school system is in our planning and implementation and would love to hear comments from others via blog post or tweet.

In Mountain Brook Schools, we implemented a "Guest" wireless network, an "Apple" wireless network, and a MBS (Mountain Brook Schools) wireless network several years ago. What is the difference in the networks you might ask? The MBS network is the wireless network used to authenticate our school system owned Windows laptops. All K-12 students in our district have individual logins and passwords, have access to a "personal" home directory or network storage and access to shared space for collaboration. The MBS network allows students to access all network resources via school system owned laptops. The Apple network was originally designed for Apple computers and laptops used in fine arts classes. This network allowed access to the Internet and printing but not access to network storage. We knew that the picture, video and audio files created in these classes could easily "fill up" home directories so  use alternative storage for these classes. Last but not least, the Guest network was created for any students, parents, and/or visitors that brought personal laptops onto a school campus. The access works with our Cisco solution. When trying to access the Guest network, a Cisco window pops up and the visitor or student enters the access code and password. After connection the guest laptop has access to the Internet only. If the owner of the laptop is an employee or student, he/she can access his/her files via our Stoneware portal.

Although personal laptops were allowed at the discretion of the local school administrator, most students chose to NOT bring a laptop to and from school since laptops or computers are provided on campus.

With the invent of Smart phones, the IPad, Android devices and Kindle Fire,  students DID want to bring their personal devices to school and DID want to use these personal devices in class.   Many of our administrators and staff agreed initially and others agreed after intense research. 

It was time to expand our network to support personal tablets and to change the Code of Conduct (which is a Board policy) to allow students to have phones at school at the discretion of the administration of each school and specifically each teacher. The Board of Education voted to accept the changes to the Code of Conduct for the 2011-2012 school year.

We have developed a set of guidelines to include in the appendices of our AUP and that will appear in our elementary Student Handbooks. I have not had the opportunity to discuss these Guidelines with secondary principals as of this post. Guidelines for BYOD.

In addition and in preparation of what is to come, since August 2011, we  developed an infrastructure upgrade plan and are in the process of securing funding and are in the process of developing Moodle modules that will provide professional development in regard to teaching in a digital environment.

These modules include but are not limited to classroom management, designing high quality digital learning environments, digital citizenship instruction for students using Common Sense Media's Curriculum (http://www.commonsensemedia.org/educators/curriculum) and more. This Moodle course is a blend of online and face to face PD and is in addition to our Summer Learning Conference formerly known as the Technology Conference.

We have investigated Mobile Device Management (MDM) products and have determined that we want a system that is not OS specific. We believe Air-Watch to be a strong contender for this solution.

We are in the process of conducting a Digital Device Pilot (DDP) in nine classrooms to answer many of our other questions. Students will have iPads to use at school and home. The participating teachers are encouraged to use digital content/textbooks instead of printed text.

I believe it will be an exciting 2012-2013 school year and look forward to the challenge of change.