BYO BYO (Build Your Own Bring Your Own)

Session 4

Laura Blankenship, Jeffrey Goldader — The Baldwin School

Room 1080

Last year, a group of faculty at The Baldwin School began meeting informally to talk about teaching with technology. We decided the main obstacle keeping us from moving forward was a lack of access for too many of our students and a culture that viewed technology as either an encroachment (faculty) or entertainment (students). A 1:1 program, we decided, could change both. We formed an ad-hoc 1:1 group, and then, through a very grass roots process, we decided on a platform and a process for implementing this program. We built our own hybrid bring your own device program. It was the collaborative grass-roots nature of the process that we credit with the success of the implementation. We faced many challenges, including gaining buy-in from all constituencies, choosing a platform, aligning the technology choices with our pedagogy, managing costs, and handling upgrades to our technology infrastructure. We will share our approach to these challenges, showing how we came out relatively unscathed on the other side. Through group conversation, we will ask attendees share their own approaches to tackling technology initiatives.

Conversational Practice

For the conversation piece, we will have attendees in small groups think about a big technology initiative that might be on the horizon or that they have just gone through. We would ask them to think through what the process might look like when working with a faculty group. Who would they include in that group? What are the pain points and how would the group address them? How would the group involve the administration? Students? Parents? How will the group reflect on the process and improve it? What role will the group have in maintaining the change they initiate? Groups will share their conversations. We want attendees to leave with a better idea for how small groups of faculty can effect institutional change by working together and by thinking institutionally together. We hope they will go home with a plan of who they might gather together and what questions they might start asking.

[Google Doc Handout] (http://goo.gl/hcC5fx) [Our Notes] (http://goo.gl/zGPc48) Decision Diagram Decision Flow Chart