In our January issue, the Central Times reported that the program was cancelled. This is incorrect, the program was not cancelled. Only
the pilot program ended.
The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) pilot program has ended after a semester at Central. The five teachers who participated in the pilot, Science Teacher Matt Gresk, World and Classical Languages Teacher Jeremy Whitt, Humanities Teacher Eleanor Barbino, and Mathematics Teachers Rob Porter and Jeff Danbom, have all discontinued BYOD in their classes.
Each teacher’s feedback will be considered as staff members at the Public Schools Administration Center (PSAC) debate whether or not to adopt BYOD for all classes in the district, according to Technology Integration Specialist Jennifer Madden.
In Barbino’s AP Macroeconomics class, not all students embraced the program.
“Some of the kids just [didn’t] have smartphones, computers or iPads they [were] allowed to bring to school,” said Barbino. “If you’ve got one kid with a phone in a group, can you imagine 4 kids reading the phone? That’s why we stopped; we didn’t really need it.”
Gresk noted that there were difficulties with uniformity in the technology. Students often had very different devices.
“The main challenge was we didn’t know what standard programs students would have on their devices,” Gresk said. According to him, Apple devices would not cooperate with flash animations on some textbook websites.
In other classes, BYOD brought a beneficial change to the curriculum.
“The kids [in my Honors Geometry classes] used the dynamic geometry software to see and discover geometric concepts more than we had in the past,” said Porter. “In that regard, the use of technology in my classroom helped student learning and achievement.”
Some believe that BYOD is a step toward more technology-based classrooms.
“It’s not the answer, but it’s an answer to the technology situation we’re trying to address,” said Gresk. “If we’re trying to get a 1 to 1 ratio of students to technology, we have to recognize that there are a lot of devices already on the students and I think we have to capitalize on that in some way.”
