Duration: 2:17
Wairakei School principal, Shane Buckner discusses why the school adopted a BYOD approach to enable their children to become connected, capable learners, using one-to-one devices to personalise learning. He describes how staff used the e-Learning Planning Framework for analysis and saw the need to engage the community. Staff and leaders also found they needed to work together to develop a pathway of learning opportunities for staff.
Shane Buckner:
At Wairakei School, one-to-one BYOD means you are actually taking ownership of the device, you’re taking ownership of your learning, you’re working collaboratively, you’re actually signing up, really, to the fundamentals of how we use our device at school.
The overall vision for BYOD here at Wairakei School is around making sure our children are connected, capable learners. For our school vision, the characteristics of the learner are visible in everything we do.
Well we believe one-to-one device is a more optimum way of learning. For one, the child gets to use it during class time, they get to take it back home and carry on with their learning.
Our students are really not bound by time and space because of the learning opportunities they have by owning their own device. It’s that ubiquity coming out. One of the reasons why we have one-to-one BYOD is that the device is personalised to them. The children are able to have their own unique login.
Now we took part in the e-Learning Planning Framework, and after analysing the information that we got from the staff there were a couple of clear dimensions that we had to work on.
One of them was around engaging our communities more, and we just thought that this is actually a really opportune way of doing that.
As part of the eLPF framework we found as a staff we need to work together more in developing a pathway of learning opportunities for our staff. This has led to us being able to develop professional learning in fun ways using our Techie Brekkies. We come together for breakfast with a focus on a specific idea and we work together in a collaborative fashion learning off each other.
And then obviously we looked at developing a pilot programme for our BYOD so we could actually engage the children and the families in that.
The kids in the class are really self-motivated. They are independent, they are owning their own learning. It’s just fantastic to see.