It is no secret that BYOD is a trend is sweeping the nation in every facet of industry. One particular industry that has unique obstacles for BYOD is K12 public education.
Technology in the classroom was originally used to augment the presentation elements of instruction only. As time went on, the interactive aspects that have arisen have given teachers a whole new capability to evaluate student understanding at the beginning, middle, and end of instruction, simplify recordkeeping and even modify instruction in real time, based upon student responses. A leading manufacturer of a personal response system (PRS) for classrooms is expensive and requires dedicated equipment that the district must purchase. These “clickers” are useless outside of the classroom so there is minimal risk of theft and they take little time to hand out and collect at the beginning and end of class. Math teachers know the drill with handing out graphing calculators, especially in urban districts where students often cannot provide their own. This is not very time-consuming; it becomes ritual and is considered standard operating procedure in districts with high levels of poverty.
While this is a great example of a personal response system and comes with a fantastic gradebook application for free, the choices for student responses are limited to basically multiple choice, exact numerical answers and text answers that have to be entered the “old-fashioned way.” Remember when we texted but didn’t have smartphones with keyboards? Imagine writing a few sentence responses for your teacher like that.
Many free Web 2.0 applications have sprung up such as Socrative that create a much richer choice of options for student responses and are doubly impressive in how they “play well” with online learning management systems’ gradebooks, such as Edmodo, but require a smartphone, tablet or some sort of device with Internet access.
In an affluent school setting, expecting every student to have a device to work on, even using 3G, isn’t as much of challenge even if the school has restrictive Wi-Fi policies. But what if you teach in an urban district where students might have a smartphone or might not? What if they can’t afford a big data package or can’t get reception and they are not allowed to use the school’s Wi-Fi? Do you hand out district tablets to everyone so they can use the Wi-Fi? If some students are able and willing to use their devices and data plans to work in a traditional BYOD fashion in the classroom, how can you avoid distributing school devices to only some students without embarrassing them? If you try to do it before or after class or as some sort of loaner system, how can you ensure the safety of that device and that it will remain in your “fleet” without being stolen or jailbroken?
This is where mobile device management (MDM) solutions such as MaaS360 come in handy. You can use this simple cloud-based solution to not only filter and limit unknown user’s access to your district’s Wi-Fi, but you can make the staff and students that do BYOD feel comfortable that their personal data is not being intruded upon.
More impressive than just managing a wireless network and the devices attached to it, district devices can be located using geo-fencing and if they are “missing”, they can be wiped and/or locked remotely. This can greatly reduce the potential of hardware loss due to the unscrupulous few students who might otherwise take advantage of a “free device” or even attempt to “jailbreak it.”
MaaS360 (News - Alert) has the ability to detect whether any device (district or BYOD) is jailbroken and can warn users that their privileges will be revoked or if it is district hardware, can be wiped, locked, and located. For those unaware, jailbroken devices can lead to all sorts of security risks both to network integrity as well as students’ official records and data that needs to be secured to comply with FERPA.
What’s more, access to the district Wi-Fi managed by MaaS360 can be moderated into different types of users, where perhaps teachers have less blocked sites and more access than students and administrators have even less restrictions.
Managing applications and files on district devices is also simplified using MaaS360. Devices can be configured remotely with only certain apps and files for a particular subject area or course, and then reconfigured to be used in another class or for another subject remotely as well. This could be done by semester, or day to day, as carts of devices move form one classroom to another.
Edited by Rachel Ramsey