My husband is a really nice guy and spent much of Saturday morning editing a draft of JD and my’s book chapter on Bring Your Own Tech. About page 24, there is a review comment that says…” There’s a dangling thought to finish first, though, about the challenge BYOT poses to the way we think about technology in the school. I think this paradigm-shift issue could use a whole paragraph.” (he then goes on to suggest a possible global rewrite that sent me into seizures).
Sometimes it takes someone outside the discipline to name the elephant staring you in the face. BYOT does signify a paradigm shift. One we are still flushing out… but for right now it boils down to this… School decision making is traditionally based on the assumption of “school” as located in time and space. Student A uses school resources, in the school building, during school hours, monitored by school personal and so on. But, experience is showing us that our students are posting online assignments, researching and communicating at all hours of the day and night (just check those time stamps of Edline document uploads). They are blogging, video conferencing, file sharing, collaborating – creating at home, at school, in the car (hopefully not when driving!). Our world is no longer home - school - practice - home…. So, if time and space no longer solely define the educational day, then we must shift how we make decisions related to access, retrieval and use. Student A can now use any web-enable device to write the assigned paper, upload to Google Docs while sitting at the dentist’s office. The type of device, web 2.0 tool, cloud storage is no longer the focus of teaching and learning - the paradigm shifts to focus on the educational learning objective letting go of the need to control the format of presentation.
And don't get me started on the paradigm shift for professional development this creates! More on that later in the week!
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