Personalized and Targeted education with ‘Bring Your Own Device’

Bring Your Own Device is an extended trend in education and business. Schools allow students to bring their own devices to study and to connect to the learning resources. BYOD transforms traditional learning, changes thinking and brings new solutions. Using devices makes our practices more relevant to modern life. Sounds like a good change?

7 reasons FOR using  personal devices in the classroom

Higher engagement

Kids and teens are tuned into using technology. Their personal devices stay with them 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. It allows them to learn anytime, anywhere at their own pace.

Online interactive games instead of traditional assessments allow teachers to easily engage teenage students. Play Kahoot is one of the great ways to check where your students are, before walking out of the classroom with the help of multiple choice questions, instant feedbacks and achieved results. Kahoot is perfect for revision and summarizing.

Have you ever tried Answergarden and Primary Pad? If no yet, check out this article.

Vocabulary can be presented via online matching games and relevant pictures chosen by your students. BYOD language teachers like  Quizzlet as it is super easy to use. It has flashcards section, scatter sections and tests. Scatter is good for practising via matching games. Students can make their own Quizzlets by typing words, definitions and choosing preferred pictures.

Relevant content

We have always wanted our students to be content creators with BYOD they have better opportunities at that. Devices make more options available and provide content which is current, relevant and often more engaging and interactive than flat, boring textbooks.

BYOD  classroom opens the opportunity to often use QR codes for additional information and personalized materials.

Universal connectivity

BYOD bridges the walls between students from different classes, schools, cities, even countries. It encourages communication, creating and sharing works with a broader audience. As a result, kids stay more connected with their peers even outside school.

Learners compete and play educational quizzes with peers from other classes. Socrative offers online team quizzes and space races. Teachers can select a number of teams within the classroom, school, city or country, then choose their names, spread entering the number and launch the space race between teams.

Students can also compare learning environments in different countries by having video talks organized by BYOD teachers. Teachers can look for colleagues who use devices in the classrooms on Facebook*, online ESL webinars and conferences.

Expert learning

We can provide learning from true professionals who really can give our students extra insights and make our students really empowered and interested in the lesson. BYOD brings various experiences in the classroom from videos, talks and interviews with experts like on Masterclass to the real calls to some industry experts.

Better collaboration

We observe social learning while students actively cooperate and collaborate online. Teachers move away from the stage and guide their students on their learning path. This is what we call a valuable authentic and student-centred learning.

Find lesson ideas here.

Saving trees

Teachers can provide a greater variety of materials and assignments paperless. We make our world a better place by moderate and intelligent use of its natural resources.

Blended learning

Being inspired and motivated teachers,  we can start increasing access to technology in our language learning classrooms today. We can apply blended learning where our students will learn both with devices and without them.

BYOD classroom model should be combined with right pedagogy, therefore, you should prepare your first BYOD experience carefully. Here are some tips from experienced BYOD teachers.

Make a survey

You can conduct a quick survey between parents, students and administrators to reveal their attitude to using own devices during the class. A short presentation and quick discussion will bring some ideas and prepare your students for this new experience.

Prevent discipline issues

Teachers should provide the efficient guideline for using devices during the lesson. The guideline should be simple and clear. As an example, STOP LIGHT for managing the use of devices in the elementary classroom. Where red means — the device should be face down or turned off, yellow — face down set to silent, green-  use your device, stay on task.

Make it simple

To avoid common problems teachers can establish a sort of a checklist for their classes. The common issues are uncharged devices, unstable internet connection, complicated passwords. Try to anticipate these issues using quick reminders, extra chargers, plugs ( if possible) and change all passwords to the simplest ones.

Technology should play a role in our classroom. We educate our students for jobs that do not yet exist, so we should take risks and challenge ourselves in order to open new opportunities to our beloved students.

Innovate education, win smart leadership and change the future.
Ideas are taken from CUE/Powerful learning 2015 Fall Conference