Bring Your Own Device

Parental Communication

We are encouraging the use of multiple platforms and devices, students that are confident to work on a PC, Mac or other system tend to me more employable and confident to learn new things, this is one reason we are investing in a range of solutions. Students will learn to pick a good tool for the job.

Management at home:

Managing a wireless device at home can be daunting or a challenge with teenagers, we hope the following will help you decide and agree with your student the house rules.

• We think that having a wifi provider that allows parental controls is an excellent idea, this can help you trust that content coming into the home is appropriate, different providers do this in various ways, why don’t you contact them and ask for support if needed.

• Many parents have a public space policy to avoid devices being used into the night. This is where the portable devices are only allowed to be used and charged in family areas, so no bedrooms. Having blinking LEDs on charge or late night screen time can have a serious effect on sleep patterns.

• Consider having a weeknight device curfew. Say 1 hour before bed, remove blue lit screens at this time, you may find this helps with rest and sleep.

• Don’t use the BYOD device as a social device, most teens have phones and games consoles for this. It will help the student to define time on the device as work time and reduce distractions (and the temptation in class) this is one major reason we don’t allow phones to act as the BYOD.

• Charge the device over night, this is practical, with cheaper energy costs and the device will be ready for work the next day.

Management when travelling:

Our advice would be to have the device away in a bag on public transport, this will discourage attention from potential thieves.

We would also advise that you consider a neoprene or other protective case, one that can help protect a device from a bump or even scratches within a bag. Most damage issues come from a device in transit rather than use. Computers today are well built for being moved but various parts can become loose or damaged if not cared for. Our IT team can often help, fix or provide advice but are not responsible for the upkeep of non school owned devices. We are here to enable students to learn as far as we can.

Management at school:

The size of our lockers are:

• Depth: 15.5” (39.5cm)

• Heigth: 17” (43.0cm)

• Width: 11” (28.0cm)

• Diagonal 17.5” (45.0cm) (remember if you device is 2 cm deep this will reduce this messurement)

We have provided lockers for students that wish to secure their device when not being used, the main time for this will be break and lunch times.

We would hope that devices are charged at home, classrooms do not have enough sockets to charge devices during lessons and this could cause students to work in awkward positions. It also causes an issue for cables as tripping hazards.

Plugging in and sharing chargers could have a safety implication in the charger has become faulty, this is more likely if it has been stuffed in a bag every day and become damaged.

Games and distractions:

Students really struggle with this temptation when in class when they get a device no matter what age. We will record behaviour points for the students choice to not progress with learning, a continued failure to learn would result in a more closely monitored approach and a lack of freedom to use the device. This choice to learn is an important skill to develop and it’s easier to teach at GCSE level then later at A level where contact time and monitoring is reduced.

You may think that it is hard to see and identify when a student is not learning, it’s not, like any behaviour it can be spotted and seen very easily from body language and action when you are looking.