(Dion Reyes) BYOD 1 to 1

I thought that Andy brought up some great questions that I thought about as I was reading.  I also thought about the incredible cost that a program like this would cause for a district.  

The first item that crossed my mind was the cost factor because nothing can get done without someone spending the money on it.  As Christian pointed out, BYOD helps to alleviate the financial strains that many districts are currently facing while still bringing updated technology into the classroom.  However, I do think that there will still be a need for some kind of device in every classroom for those students who either cannot afford a device or those whose parents will not allow them to bring their device for multiple reasons. 

Going back to Andy’s questions I thought about how do we get the majority on board so that the “laggards” will eventually follow.  While I think that the cost factor of BYOD is great, I think that is can be a challenge to staff members.  I do believe that BYOD will help some students with the familiarity component when it comes to navigating different tasks, but I also believe that many students are only familiar with the tasks that are most essential to their personal lives.  These tasks might align with what a teacher is trying to accomplish or not.  I believe this will be one of the greatest obstacles we will face as we move forward with this initiative across our district.  I see teachers becoming frustrated with the fact that they themselves are not familiar with the operating systems the students are using or finding something that works across all platforms.  While I believe finding something that works on all platforms will become easier with time as technology progresses I also believe that we can alleviate some of that by having some kind of central place where teachers can go to for ideas or sites that work.  We will also have to prepare teachers for how to handle the struggles of using different platforms.  This means we will need to continue to support the staff throughout the building with eLC’s and different professional development opportunities for teachers.  I believe this, like all things, will have a learning curve and that teachers will become more knowledgeable as they become more familiar with the different technologies and products out there.  Other than training teachers how to use all the different platforms out there, I believe we must sell it to them as a learning opportunity.  We are after all supposed to be educational leaders in the classroom and therefore should be able to show our students that while we might now always know all of the answers we can figure them out and learn like they do which I believe will lead to classroom leaders that can help with other students.  All of this will be a process but if we can start the fire, I believe that it will spread.