To minimize the expense of one-to-one initiatives, some schools choose to participate in bring your own device (BYOD) initiatives. This finds schools encouraging students to bring devices they own to school, connecting them to an SSID, and using them for their schoolwork. This can pose several difficulties for IT professionals; security being the most important. Others raise concern about equity as individuals may not be able to afford their own devices or may find it necessary to use insufficient devices or those that are malfunctioning.
Even in schools that do not have BYOD initiatives as an alternative to one-to-one initiatives, the fact that students and teachers often bring their own devices to school can be a challenge for school IT professionals. If they are connected to the local cellular network, there is generally little reason to connect these to the school network, but guest SSID’s may be provided to allow some connection to the internet through the school gateway.
School IT professionals will not support devices they do not own, but in many cases, they will recommend strategies for incorporating media on students’ and teachers’ devices into school projects. For example, school IT professionals may recommend installing Google Workspace apps on personal devices so that users can upload images or documents to their school accounts.
Story from the real world: Kara was using one of the Macintosh computers in the multimedia studio during study hall. It was connected to the library, and the technology integration specialist was preparing for a video editing lesson. Kara went into the history on her web browser and found pornographic web sites listed. She reported it to the technology integration specialist who confirmed the internet filter was still functioning, then he looked at Kara’s computer and found that the technicians who had installed the computers had not disables the wireless network interface card (NIC) on the computers. The traffic passing through the Ethernet NIC on the Macintoshes was filtered on the network. To bypass the filter, someone had connected the Macintosh to a wireless hot spot on their phone. In this case, devices not owned by the school posed a potential threat to the school as the students may have exposed the school computer to malware along with the pornographic images.
Many educators are concerned about students’ access to their own devices while in school as they can interfere with learning. It has become clear that human brains are unable to multitask, so attending to incoming messages on their own devices may distract students from lessons. In addition, because the devices bypass the filters maintained to comply with the Children’s Internet Protection Act, students may be accessing and sharing all types of unsavory information.