I had the pleasure of attending the seminar hosted by TorqueIP in Wellington recently where Sam Gliksman shared his thoughts about building an effective school BYOD plan.

The event was extremely well attended, as were similar events in Auckland, Hamilton and Christchurch, which illustrates the amount of interest there is in this topic. Gliksman spent some time establishing the context for considering BYOD (perhaps could have glossed over this bit more quickly as most of the crowd would have heard this already) before moving on to make a case for the educational benefits of using mobile technologies in classrooms, including those owned by the students themselves. He covered off issues like control, filtering, security, wireless access and the digital divide, providing useful illustrations of what can/might be done in a school context.

Overall I found it a useful event – particularly for the amount of conversation it stimulated among those present. A disappointment was probably that while Glikman made an excellent case for mobile devices in the classroom, I felt he missed an opportunity to explore more explicitly the pedagogical advantages of student-owned (BYOD) devices over class sets that are owned by the school (apart from the economic argument which was referred to).

Thanks to TorqueIP for putting these seminars on through the country.