BYOD in Education: Why

Part 3 of a 5 Part Series

For everyone that came to our Heinz Field event on BYOD, this article just repeats part of the key message at the conference. It was such an important point, I thought I would dedicate this blog article to that.

Some of the first questions you need to ask yourself when discussing BYOD revolve around WHY?

• Why are we adopting BYOD in our district?
• Do we have a curriculum model that supports or encourages BYOD?
• What happens to that curriculum model if something is not working?
• How do we handle students that do not have a device to use?

If the answer to any of these questions is “I don’t know”, then you may not be ready for BYOD. Just adopting BYOD is not enough, there has to be a reason for you to do it, and that reason needs to be viable enough to justify the cost and overhead of supporting consumer devices.

Supporting BYOD is a multi-stage process, and the very first step is understanding why you need or want to support it. This decision itself can be difficult if technology has not played a major role in your existing curriculum, so you may want to discuss it with other districts that are already doing BYOD (or have adopted a one to one or one to two initiative), with your teachers and curriculum coordinator, and even with Questeq to get ideas of what you can provide to the students. The justification to adopt BYOD should not be to just say you have it, but should be why you need to support it.

– John Sanderbeck, Questeq Infrastructure Engineer

Read Part 1 of this BYOD series here.
Read Part 2 of this BYOD series here.