Inspiration and BYOD

This is the first post in literally years. I feel ashamed but was inspired this past spring by Kevin Honeycutt to tell my story as an educator. The stories that can come out of my school building as teachers inspire high poverty and multicultural/lingual students to strive for success would be totally invigorating to a teacher that is in a rut. One of the policies that my district has put into place that we are trying to come to grips with is BYOD or Bring Your Own Device. The primary reason that is found in the literature to move toward BYOD is to limit the cost for the school district to provide technology for students. There are several other arguments against BYOD but the one that is most relevant to me is the poverty gap. An example of the poverty gap compared to other schools is the number of students driving to school. We have a student population of almost 1800 students but less than 50 students drive to school. Our students cannot afford to drive cars to school. When they begin to look at cell phones, tablets, and laptops, they know that it is out of their family's economic reach. A school such as mine cannot effectively put a BYOD in place.

Another issue with BYOD that arises is the infrastructure that will need to be in place. Can we imagine almost 2000 devices being on the WiFi system at a school at the same time? Most schools' systems would slow to a crawl or crash completely. When the system becomes unreliable, teachers will not use it because it takes valuable instructional time that is crucial in our high stakes testing environment.

These our two of the reasons I disagree with BYOD in a school system as it relates to my current situation. I can see it working in smaller more affluent schools, but BYOD is not a panacea fix to our current shortage in education funding.