Disillusionment with BYOD ...... and yet

I have been teaching in a 1-1 classroom for almost 2 years now. Every student has access to a device every day all the time.

We managed to do this by simply asking students to bring whatever they already had. (Bring Your Own Device or BYOD) Some brought old machines and some parents bought new machines. Some families couldn't bring anything, but our school had enough netbooks that we could give every child one who didn't have one.

This has had a huge impact on my teaching. I have the opportunity to try and experiment with many new tools and ways of teaching. Some have been amazingly successful, some not so much. Either way it has now reached the point in my classroom that I could not teach if my students did not each have their own device.

But I am growing increasingly unhappy with BYOD. Here are a few reasons:

1. Not every device works perfectly with the tools I'm using. We are a GoogleApps school which means every student can access all their work no matter what device they are using. But we have run into trouble with iPads. They just don't handle some of the elements of GoogleApps well. (Charts and images inside documents give problems.)
2. I can't help students with their devices when they don't work. For example, I have not had the chance to learn Windows 8 yet and I've got a few Windows 8 devices. When something goes wrong I can't help them. Nor have I ever used a Mac.
3. I get frequent requests to help repair personal devices, which I cannot afford the time to do. 
4. Some students have such bad browsing habits online that their devices have become clogged with malware and have become essentially useless.
5. So far this year we have had 3 personal devices broken at school. Because they are personal devices the question of who's responsible for repairs gets a little murky.
6. Because they are personal devices the students customize them in all kinds of ways. This becomes a distraction in class when they spend more time choosing the desktop background than actually doing work, or playing games or using other apps that they've installed. (Although there is a skill here that they should learn, perhaps a topic for another blog post.)

So, when push comes to shove if I had a choice I would provide a device to every student that was managed by the school. At the moment my device of choice would probably be a Google Chromebook.

And yet.....

This is the only way we can afford to get to 1-1 for every child. We don't have the budget to buy a device for every student. And so  I am willing to suffer through the difficulty and trials because the devices are changing the way I teach.

Which is what it's all about.