One More Thing About the BYOD Pilot

When I was discussing Howard County's new pilot program for BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) earlier today, I forgot to mention another aspect of the program being tested.  While I read about the BYOD program, I kept thinking about how UDL it all sounded.  UDL is Universal Design for Learning, and made me think of it was a quote in the CBS Baltimore article I read:

“They can fit what’s their style the best, and the comfort in the technology they have,” said Scott Ruehl, principal.

We learned about UDL in class a few weeks back, and its attempts to appeal to all learning types really makes me think of the Special Ed classes I was in while growing up - only rather than giving me tips and techniques to leverage my strengths into the mainstream, it is giving the bag of tricks to the mainstream for everyone to play with.  Not a bad idea, if you can make it work.

With this as my background, it is understandable that I keep thinking of BYOD as a way to not only get tech into the hands of more students, allowing them to learn by doing rather than watching, but also as a way to meet IEP in a fairly discrete manner.  A hard of hearing student may have a program loaded on their device that will translate the teacher's speech into text, which can be saved as a data file.  Students with poor eyesight can increase the font size on their screens, rather than hunching over a magnifying glass as one of my high school classmates needed to do.  Dyslexic students can have apps downloaded to their device, allowing the device to read to them through a set of earbuds.  Technology can't solve every learning challenge - but its tool box is diverse enough to accommodate most learning challenges and preferences.

One thing that I discovered, returning to this subject this evening, is that Howard County is not the first school system to try the BYOD program - it is just the first that I've heard of.  A Google search for "BYOD" comes up with a wide array of results, mostly from businesses or providing definitions and evaluations.  Refining the search to "BYOD in schools" cuts the results in half, but with around 836,000 hits - there's still plenty to choose from.  Just reading my results list, I understand that many school systems across the country are trying BYOD programs in their schools, and that there is a lively debate about whether or not this is a good thing.

At this point, I believe that BYOD has spread far enough into the worlds of business and education that the question isn't "are we going to adopt this?" but rather, "how are we going to adopt this?".   So, on that note, I'll simply leave you with links to two sites where you can find some excellent videos on BYOD: Hanover Public Schools in Pennsylvania, and Long Reach High School in Howard County, Maryland.