We are 3 weeks into our BYOD initiative. Well, not exactly 3 weeks. Officially, we are 10 days into BYOD at LMK, but who's really counting. We have many things to be proud of such as getting every student in the school to log in successfully to Google and successfully managing over 2400 simultaneous connections to our network district wide.
Our IT staff has been adjusting access points by moving them when teachers notice areas of weak signal strength. They have been resetting passwords and adding new Google accounts daily. Teachers and building administrators have also been troubleshooting and answering questions each day.
As the Director of Technology, many questions come to me. Recently, a series of interactions made me remember a story I used to tell my students when I taught 7th grade science and we would discuss the great electricity debates between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse in the late 19th century. The story goes something like this. Thomas Edison developed a method of producing direct current. He used it to light his famous light bulbs. While it was effective and safe, it was not practical since he could not deliver it over long distances. This is where George Westinghouse came in. Westinghouse created the method for creating and delivering alternating current. Edison knew that this would end his dominance in the world of delivered electricity, so he made it his mission to degrade Westinghouse and prove that his alternating current was unsafe. Edison found everything he could find that was wrong with alternating current and he publicized it. He invented the first "electrocution" machines that used alternating current to kill animals such as dogs and horses in the public arena to discredit Westinghouse's alternating current. These machines later became what we know to be the "electric chair".
Yes, it is true that alternating current is dangerous. Yet, we cannot live in our world without it. In almost everything we do in life, we can always find the negative. We can always find what doesn't work, and what may even hurt us. That's the easy part. In the end, Edison failed to prove that the world didn't need alternating current. The world only needed to see its true value. Thinking positively about it proved its success, even with the many doubters and naysayers.
I know you must be thinking...what is the connection to BYOD? It's easy to find what doesn't work, what is challenging and maybe even impossible. BYOD and Google is a different way of doing things...maybe it's akin to alternating current over 100 years ago. Only time will tell.
Link to previous BYOD and Going Google Posts:
http://educreatechnics.blogspot.com/2015/09/byod-day-1-of-many.html
http://educreatechnics.blogspot.com/2015/05/going-google-part-2.html
http://educreatechnics.blogspot.com/2015/01/being-creative-with-google.html
http://educreatechnics.blogspot.com/2015/03/google-classroom-part-1.html
Follow me @brian_seligman
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