DAYBREAK MIDDLE SCHOOL students (from left) Abi Stuber, Gage Hay and Nadia Mendoza access the Google Classroom app using their own personal mobile devices.
Nope, you didn’t read that incorrectly, it says BYOD.
Recently, several schools in the Battle Ground School District have started implementing a practice known as BYOD – Bring Your Own Device. The idea is to allow students to use their own technology at school in order to enhance academic instruction.
Scott McDaniel, director of technology services at Battle Ground Public Schools, said school district officials and staff started talking about using BYOD in Battle Ground schools during the beginning of the 2013-2014 school year. After finishing several wireless upgrades throughout the district, a group was formed of administrators, teachers and IT personnel who worked to go over what policy changes would be needed in order to put BYOD into place. Finally, a pilot of the program was launched last school year at CAM Academy, Daybreak Middle School and Prairie High School.
“We spent about half the year going over policies, procedures, creating some presentations and we also created a student responsibility agreement to help govern how it will be used,” McDaniel said. “Everything went pretty well at those three schools, there were a couple of bumps and some small things we’ve learned, and we’ve been preparing teachers and students with how to deal with anything that might come up.”
This school year, after getting approval from School Board members to make some changes to policies to allow for BYOD, McDaniel and Sean Chavez, communications manager for the district, began going out and meeting with principals who had shown interest in implementing BYOD at their schools. The three schools that participated in the pilot last year are still up and running, and five other schools had expressed interest in implementing the program. Two of those five schools, Battle Ground High School and Maple Grove K-8 School, are both looking to go live with BYOD during the second semester this year.
The other schools that have expressed interest in BYOD include both schools on the Pleasant Valley campus, Chief Umtuch Middle School and possibly River HomeLink.
“It’s basic, it’s real world,” McDaniel said of BYOD. “It’s not just a school thing, it’s not just in education, a lot of corporations now allow use of personal devices for work. We need information and we need to be able to retrieve that information, the mobile devices are everywhere. Imagine you send your student to school with a bunch of textbooks and tell them they’re not allowed to open them. We are able to provide the same filtering and school security as we do on the school computers.”
McDaniel said the device a student chooses to bring to school can basically be any device – an iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, a tablet or even a laptop.
“We’ve been talking with students and making sure they understand that this is a privilege and we won’t keep it if they misbehave,” McDaniel said. “We’ve also been working with parents, we want parents to know they aren’t expected to send their student to school with a mobile device if they don’t want to. It’s not replacing normal teaching practices or anything, it’s simply allowing students to have access to an educational tool.”
McDaniel said students use their same network account to log in to their device at school as they would on a school district computer. Some of the ways he said students can use their devices at school include using it for mapping programs, note taking, accessing video for a class and more. Teachers can have students use different apps and programs on their devices such as Google Classroom, Edmodo and others. Use of mobile devices also allows teachers to quickly poll students in a class to see if they all understand something.
“Students and teachers can use Google for a lot of different things,” McDaniel said. “Allowing students to bring their own devices also allows us to do some things that are totally in line with Common Core state standards.”
