Fraser Speirs on BYOD ↪︎
A great series of tweets from Fraser Speirs, who ran the first one-to-one school iPad programme in the world:
It’s now entirely clear to me that BYOD is a failed idea in K-12 EdTech. A complete evolutionary dead-end.
This isn’t a platform-specific point. iPad or Chromebook, K-12 teachers, pupils, parents and schools need more consistency, predictability, control and supervision than BYOD can possible provide.
BYOD buries the cost of device management in individual staff effort. If you won’t do integration once at the school level, each teacher will do it daily at the classroom level and usually much worse.
The weaknesses of BYOD have been obvious to me in theory for at least half a decade but now we are seeing it play out in practice.
The very existence of the textbook shows we’ve understood for hundreds of years the importance of consistency in education. Teachers need to know their tools, and they need to know their students’ tools. Bring your own device is about as good a strategy as bring your own textbook.