District Administration - April 2012 - (Page 28)

cio District Technology from The cIo perspecTIve Creating a robust and safe bYod Program Plan to upgrade your district’s infrastructure for increased capacity and security. By Ron Schachter ntil recently, student electronic devices, from cell phones to iPods to laptop computers, were the forbidden fruit in schools. But with technology budgets languishing and such devices becoming more powerful, affordable and omnipresent in students’ lives, district technology leaders are now eyeing a welcome educational harvest through bring-yourown-device (BYOD) programs. Lucy Gray, project director of the U Leadership for Mobile Learning Initiative at the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), has studied early BYOD adopters. “I’m stunned by the number of school districts opening their minds to this approach,” she says. High school, middle school and even elementary school students in a growing number of districts are being encouraged to bring in the very electronic equipment they were once admonished to leave at home. “There was a certain inevitability, as these devices became more common and cheaper, that at some point kids would be bringing them to school,” explains Tim Wilson, chief technology officer for the ISD 279-Osseo Area Schools in Minnesota. “If something’s coming, we might as well invite it in and learn to manage it.” To hear Wilson and other tech directors tell it, these devices are more than welcome. Wilson’s BYOD program is called Copernicus, after the astronomer who proved that the sun was at the center of the solar system. “This is our attempt to put students at the center of our technology integration,” he says. In Minnesota, Wilson is overseeing the third year of a BYOD program, which took root at three high schools and five classrooms in the district’s elementary schools. “We started small and let it grow organically,” he says. The number of student- and teacher-owned devices has grown to over 3,000. While that number is a fraction of the Osseo Area’s 21,000 students spread across 25 schools, the influx of student-owned devices is already making a difference. “Some classrooms might have half the kids with devices and others just a handful,” Wilson notes, adding that every year after Christmas break, a new supply of student-owned devices comes into the schools. “The students will share devices, and in lots of situations, that encourages collaboration among them. Our school district cannot afford a one-to-one computer program. The BYOD program allows us to use our own resources and to supplement them [with student devices].” In the 180,000-student Fairfax County (Va.) Public Schools, meanwhile, almost 60,000 student devices have become an integral part of the school day—one of the largest such deployments in the country. The district’s chief information officer, Maribeth Luftglass, hopes that, over the next several years, nearly all the students will bring their own devices. “Our hope is that if kids bring enough devices, it will help us with our underfunded cycle for refreshing computers in the classroom,” she says. District Administration 28 April 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - April 2012

District Administration - April 2012
Contents
From the Editor
News Update
Special Ed Update
Facilities Update
District Profile
Administrator Profile
Robust and Safe BYOD
Success Breeds Success
Funding Building Projects in a Tough Economy
Widening Participation to an IB Education
Why All the Chatter about #EdChat?
Supervisor’s Opinion
Going Mobile
New Directions
Crisis Response
Student Counsel
Product Focus
Online Edge

District Administration - April 2012