Bring Your Own Tools (BYOT)

The history of educational computing can be broken into several easily recognizable phases:

1) The Age of Obtaining Computers lasted into the mid 1990's and was marked by school and technology leaders buying computers to makes sure that students could be in front of screens.

2) The Age of Connecting Computers lasted from the mid-1990's (when the World Wide Web became the-next-big-thing) until the early 2000's when we reached nearly 100% of classrooms with high speed Internet connections in US schools.

3) The Ages of Integrating Computers and The Age of Chasing One-to-One followed the Age of Connecting Computers and those were concurrent. The Age of Integration marked educators' focus on using technology in the classroom, and I have suggested that integration is a term that is no longer meaningful, so we should abandon it (check here for more details-- also look up my presentations at the NELMS Annual Conference in April 2011). The Age of Chasing One-to-One includes recent efforts (for example by our friends in Maine) to make sure each student has a computer.

As I watch One-to-One initiatives, I am seeing school purchase netbooks. I understand the decision (the devices are cheap compared to full computers), but I have seen several initiatives struggle because educators misunderstand the nature of netbooks. (In a particular instance, I saw a teacher struggle to create a 45-minute video on her netbook. She grew frustrated as the demands of processing the data to render the video overwhelmed the machine. School leaders planned to purchase netbooks with larger hard drives to avoid the problem again... they really did not understand what they were trying to do and why they could not be successful!)

There is rumblings on the web sites and in the magazines read by school techies that we are fast approaching the Age of Bring Your Own Tool in schools. Students are coming into our schools with far greater computing power than we can provide them. There is talk of using that computing power for teaching.