The Educational Importance of BYOT

Bring Your Own Technology (BYOT) is critical in the digital evolution of schools, when normalising whole school use of the digital, and when shaping digitally-based school ecosystems.

Ideally, young people should be trusted in the classroom to use the digital technologies they are already using in the ‘real world’ to enhance their learning.

While the young, parents and, invariably teachers have normalised the use of the digital outside the school walls and have expectations of the digital, few schools globally have normalised its use and are yet to reap the myriad opportunities and benefits.

The reason is simple: it is very hard to do so. It requires each school to move from its traditional paper based operational mode, culture and mindset to a mode that is digitally based, where the mindset is digital and the school culture actively supports change, risk taking and on-going organisational evolution and transformation.

The move to BYOT is fundamental to creating the ecosystem that enables that to happen.

It is reality few as yet appreciate.

To read the full article go to – http://teacher.acer.edu.au/article/the-importance-of-byot

2015 edition of the Taxonomy of School Evolutionary Stages

The 2015 edition of the Taxonomy of School Evolutionary Stages is now available for free download from the Taxonomy sub-section of this site

This edition updates the attributes displayed by schools operating at the Digital Normalisation evolutionary stage.

While the digital evolution and transformation of all manner of businesses is literally discussed daily in both the media and the management literature (http://www.scoop.it/t/digitalevolutionofschooling) the fact that schooling globally is undergoing the same kind of organisational evolution and transformation remains largely unseen by most schools and educational administrators, as too are the profound implications that flow from the phenomenon.

So too is the understanding that once schools, like all organisations begin their movement to a digital operational base the schools will evolve in a remarkably common manner globally, demonstrating at each evolutionary stage numerous similar attributes.

It is as if schools are unique organisations somehow immune to the impact of the digital revolution and will forever remain ensconced in their paper based world.

Nothing could be further from today’s reality.

Schools globally are at different points on the school evolutionary stages continuum, with the pathfinder schools that have normalised the use of the digital evolving and transforming their operations at an accelerating rate.

Using the 2015 edition of the Taxonomy you can quickly identify your school’s evolutionary stage and the likely path ahead.

Feel free to download the latest version, and suggest other colleagues make use of this simple international measure.

2015 Taxonomy of School Evolutionary Stages

ACER Teacher Digital Evolution Series

Mal Lee has written for ACER’s online Teacher magazine in a series of brief research papers on the digital evolution of schooling. They include: