“By the way kids, from today onwards you can bring your iPads to school!” – Done. I just launched a BYOD iPad program… Yeah. I’m afraid there’s a bit more to it than that.
In fact, there is a great deal more to it than that. A lot of thought and communication must to go into defining a program before students, parents and educators can really begin to reap the rewards that BYOD can bring. In a recently published SlideShare and blog post by educator and speaker, Chris Betcher, he shares the public launch of their school’s BYOD iPad program, shedding some light on what their school has put in place.
We invited all the parents and students to come to an information night where we explained exactly how we wanted things to work, and far more importantly, why we felt this was the right move to be making.
There are two major (and fairly unrelated) thoughts I had after watching this presentation:
The first: It’s interesting how a huge part of rolling out a successful BYOD program has nothing to do with technology. So much is about getting buy-in. Getting buy-in from parents. Students. Staff. And Administration. The more everyone is engaged in this process, the greater the chance it will be a success.
The second: How cool is SlideShare’s ability to sync audio with slides (Slidecasting)! For an extremely powerful feature, I have not seen this harnessed enough. In fact, so much so, SlideShare has recently announced the removal of the feature from the platform. So from April 30th onwards all Slidecasts will revert to plain slide decks…. Very disappointing.
What are your experiences rolling out a BYOD program? Positive and negative. Let us know in the comments below.
Feature image Ipad icon designed by iconoci for The Noun Project.