BYOD: Bring Your Own Distraction
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why Bring Your Own Device policies often backfire, turning personal devices into classroom distractions rather than learning tools.
Key Takeaways
- BYOD policies invite distraction - Personal devices come loaded with games, social media, and notifications that compete with instruction
- The 'learning tool' argument is weak - In practice, students use personal devices for entertainment far more than for learning
- School-managed devices are preferable - If technology is needed, school-issued and school-controlled devices are easier to manage
Transcript
Are cell phones valuable for learning in the classroom?
We've had BYOD, or bring your own device, for a long time in a lot of schools now.
And I think it's become increasingly clear that it's really bring your own distraction.
There is no universe in which the net benefit of cell phones in the classroom is positive.
Yes, your phone can do lots of things.
It can be a calculator, it can be a camera, it can play videos.
But when all of the possibilities are on the table, when we look at all the things that students could use a cell phone for, compared to other devices, compared to no technology at all, paper and pencil, human conversation.
I think the net impact is going to always be negative for cell phones.
And I don't know that we knew that in advance.
I think we had a pretty good hypothesis to consider, to try out, say, hey, maybe there is a net benefit to using cell phones in the classroom because certainly these are powerful tools.
But over the past decade, I think it's become clear that a lot of the value of education is not access to technology.
It's not access to information.
We've had the internet for decades now.
It's the structured opportunity to interact with other students, to interact with a teacher, to interact with content in a way that can't really be reproduced anywhere else.
And like one of the things that we talked about early on with Bring Your Own Device was the idea of a flipped classroom, that students could learn content on their own time.
They could use their device in and outside of class to kind of stay connected to the work.
I don't know that that ever really panned out, that students actually ever really did the flipped lesson at home.
Maybe there was something valuable there.
But I think the evidence now is just overwhelming that when we bring additional technology into the classroom, we're not bringing additional learning.
We are just bringing additional distraction.
Let me know what you think.