I was so happy to catch this tweet the other day that it led me on a brief discovery of similar POSITIVE BYOD technology initiatives in schools. Finally, school districts (some are listed below) that are ready to move forward and actually prepare their students for the future, not the past. 

Peel board to encourage students to BYOD—bring your own devicebit.ly/GWtqDb

— Peel School Board (@PeelSchools) March 28, 2012

See links here and here for more details on the Peel Schools decision (suggestion for Peel - lose the .TIF file that announces the good news).

The schools in Saline, Michigan have implemepted a BYOD policy with lots of very good guidelines outlined in the doucment linked here.

Frisco Independent School District in Texas also went BYOD this school year and launched it with a nice student video production. Students must use the district wireless network and cannot use their 3G or 4G service. Interesting. Same deal in Plum Borough School District in Pennsylvania.

Hanover Public School District in Pennsylvania has a whole Google Site devloted to their BOYD initiaitve. 

RT @CharmaineBrooks: Well designed leadership strategy: Wolf Creek Public Schools Embraces BYOD, Puts Pedagogy First bit.ly/oNRy2D

— convergemag (@convergemag) July 7, 2011

In the 180,000-student Fairfax County Public School system in Virginia, almost 60,000 student devices have become an vital part of the school day—one of the largest BYOD deployments in the country. The schools there hand out "approved stickers" students must attach to their devices. Check out a video from one of their middle schools.

My take on byod- it happens no matter what, it's only called byod when your curriculum takes advantage of it.

— Josh Allen (@j_allen) March 24, 2012

Will Rock Hill Schools in South Carolina take Josh's advice above and make the jump? Interestingly enough, Google searching for various combinations of BYOD and "Long Island" (my home area) returned zero public results showcasing or highlighting one of these district-wide initiatives in a local district (home to 127 school districts containing a total of 656 public schools, not counting the 230 private schools). So, why do some schools "get it" and others not?

Resources:
Current Twitter search for the #BYOD hashtag
Great read in District Administration about Creating a Robust and Ssafe BYOD Program

A recent tweet led me on a disappointing, albeit brief, journey of "Open eTextbooks" (eBooks, eTexts, or whatever other catchphrase you want to give them).

Did you know...MERLOT has over 2,100 free, online textbooks?Some peer-reviewed.Some accessibility reviews. ow.ly/9Qm4H

— MERLOT (@MERLOTorg) March 23, 2012

Well, no, I did not know that. I clicked the link and thus began my journey. I took some time to go through some of the available "Open eTextbooks" by either randomly clicking on links or looking at some of the choices in the Science & Technology category. What I discovered was a bit surprising, perplexing, and disappointing all at once considering these resources are pushed upon higher education faculty and students. I was browsing these titles on a computer while envisioning what the experience would be like on a tablet or even a smart phone. Feel free to test out some of the examples below on a phone or tablet as I am in the process of checking the same resources on both an iPad and a Galaxy Tab.

Conclusion
For those of you just looking for the point of all this, here you go:
1. Why are web sites with tables of contents considered eTextbooks? At what point does a web site qualify as an eTextbook? None of the dozens of resources I looked at seemed like a book; no cross referencing, no index, no margins for note taking, you name it. They are just organized web sites. The only resemblance to a book was a table of contents and chapter titles. Some of the texts did not even have a table of contents and several had non-clickable versions as well. So if I am on "page" 100, how do I get to page 10? When you make PDFs and include preface pages and whatnot, many times it alters the page numbering. Printed page 10 then becomes PDF page 15, for example. Why are we even trying to make web sites look like books when the mediums are so drastically different? Why did this practice ever start and why is it permissible to continue?

2. If you use blue font for text in your eTextbook, you should be doing so to inform the readers that they should click the link (or touch it). If it is not a link, don't use blue, or purple for that matter, as it is a standard web color for unvisited/visited links.

3. What's with the myriad of format choices? .XML, content package, common cartridge, ppt, doc, zip, moodle unit ... Are students supposed to just know which one to pick? Are they dependent on a particular browser/tablet/smart phone platform? If you keep linking out to other file types you are forcing readers to make a decision; continue reading the page or launch the other program/app to view this other material. Why isn't all of the material needed for the chapter or unit readily available in one spot, in one common/standard, format?

4. Why are we trying to make eTextbooks look like real, printed, books? Is anyone making books look like web sites? Educators, publishers, and most importantly STUDENTS should be helping to drive disruptive innovation in this area. Not just innovation for the sake of change, but something that truly revolutionizes the education world. Something usable by all devices that can tap into the power and features of any particular device on which the eTextbook is read. Something that doesn't need propitiatory software to view, open, and interact with the content.

5. Many of the "open eTextbooks" I looked at were created and posted before tablets and smart phone became main stream, but at what point will all these resources change over to a more mobile friendly version? More interactive? More social?

6. With all the different formats and viewing options, how are instructors and students supposed to refer to pages and sections? "Students, please turn to page 15." But, depending on the format you downloaded, our page 15s can look different. In many cases, simply enlarging the text moves page elements around and my page 15 is now different from the person next to me.

7. The most important constituent group to get involved right now is students of all levels, even the very little ones. If they are not part of the disruptive innovation process, eTextbooks will fail.

8. My final point: I don't want simply a digital version of a book. I want a new experience that takes advantage of new technology (tablets, styluses, pens with audio recording built in, social media tie-ins, location based elements, 3D, augmented reality, live instructor annotation over content displayed to student devices, ...) and is flexible enough to adapt to whatever technologies are coming next. Maybe it is a new web experience, a new standard/open publishing format (not a proprietary one), or even a new eReader that we need. The current state of eTexts is so varied and contains so many flaws that we are far from the point of simply saying, "Students, please tap on page 15." Until then, what are called eTextbooks are simply just web sites or PDFs, the latter primarily created to be printed. Sure, there are examples of some really good moves towards eTextbooks, but my focus here was to try and highlight some of the flaws with the higher ed approach. I don't even want to offer up solutions to these issues; instead of fixing it, simply re-invent it. The sampling below shows you how far behind we are.

How I Arrived There
Without going on and on here, simply take a look for yourself at the eTextbooks I found below. Every one of the examples found below was listed as an "Open eTextbook" on the MERLOT web site. Open content = YES. eTextbook = NO.

Soil Biology Primer
("This on-line version includes all of the text of the original, but not all of the images of the soil organisms. The full story of the soil food web is more easily understood with the help of the illustrations in the printed version." Wait, what? So I need both the online version AND the printed one?)
http://soils.usda.gov/sqi/concepts/soil_biology/biology.html

The Habitable Planet
(Blue text that is not a hyperlink, images with no context and not clickable)
http://www.learner.org/courses/envsci/unit/index.php

Designing the User Interface
(Download the unit link and print it - just a web site, but why "printable" and not "mobile" friendly. Making something printable saves what? Money? Paper? Toner? Time? If anything, it should have been made "computer friendly".)
http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=1779

Distributed Systems
(Rutgers text - all PPTs ??)
http://code.google.com/edu/parallel/index.html

Introduction to Philosophy
("This text has been designated by StudyWeb as one of the best educational resources on the web(2001)")
http://www.qcc.cuny.edu/SocialSciences/ppecorino/INTRO_TEXT/CONTENTS.htm

Conceptual Physics
(25+MB PDF = data plan anyone? Constantly repositioning and deskewing images, no clickable TOC, no PDF bookmarks)
http://www.lightandmatter.com/cp/index.html

An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers
(Initial caveat posted right on the site: "We make every attempt to allow our products to be read and printed reliably by Adobe Acrobat Reader. We have noticed that some versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader on different platforms may not display our products correctly. Here are some hints about possible ways to get around these difficulties.")
http://www.trillia.com/moser-number.html

Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology
(Wikipedia type format with embedded flash elements)
http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/index.php?title=Main_Page

__________________________________
I end with a final thought that is not my own:

A downloadable PDF of your hardcopy textbook is not 21st Century, Web 2.0 e-learning. #beyondthetexbook #ASCD12

— Gerald Aungst (@geraldaungst) March 26, 2012

Two recent events led very nicely into what I discovered last evening.

1. The tweet by Stephen Ransom below.
2. My conversation with a member of the district admininstration of our home school district.

First up is Stephen's tweet.

This kid is #awesome. What if he was in your class? "VIDEO: Check Out This 7-Year-Old's Monster Trap"bit.ly/wvQ1zn

— ✜ Stephen Ransom (@ransomtech) March 14, 2012

Here's the link included in Stephen's tweet and the video linked from there is also below. Well, answer Stephen's question: What if he was in your class?

I recently had the opportunity to speak with the district administrator in charge of Instructional Technology in my kids' home district. I need to reflect upon that conversation in several pending blog posts, but here's what stuck me last night. We talked and talked about so many different technolgoy topics that I've come to the conclusion, technology-wise, it's not looking good for this district. Then, in relation to my conversation, what do I come home to last night? Look at the picture below and leave a comment if you can guess what it is. Hint: it was a collaborative effort created by several 2nd graders.

Reading this article got me thinking. These 5th graders are learning to use their iPads and be very productive. What happens when they leave that class and go to 6th grade, 7th, ... 11th, 12th, college? What about the college student whose instructor has successfully integrated the iPad into the course? For the other 4 courses the student is taking that semester, are they using iPads (not to say this device is a necessity)? Is there a consistency built into the semesters and years so students are building on their experiences? If those 5th graders don't touch the iPad during their 6th grade year, can we say the 5th grade year was a success, in terms of tech integration? Was it a novelty? Positive distraction?

I think about my own experiences with my son's school. If they gave iPads to the 2nd graders this year, and fully integrated them, he'd get to 3rd grade and go through the year not using one. Unless of course, the rollout and integration was across every grade and not too many schools and districts are doing that ... yet.

Image CC license: "iPads arrive in 4th grade..." by timlauer, on Flickr

I was fortunate enough to attend the first PadCampLI unconference held on 11/11/11 at the CW Post campus of Long Island University. It was a great day in the unconference format around topics such as: apps for story telling and creativity, ereaders in the libraries, using mobile devices for eportfolio development, QR codes, app development, and more. We were fortunate enough to also have David Warlick lead a session/discussion early on pertaining to the possible demise of the traditional textbooks. He certainly wasn't predicting that this in fact will happen, but instead choose to ask us what we'd do if it were to happen say next year. It was nice to be able to attend with colleagues @drkarenn and @tomwhitby (Karen and I are over on the right in this picture) and met some other local educators I'd been following on Twitter.

I do hope there is not just one, but many more PadCamps on Long Island and some more unconferences too on other topics of interest to the tech-in-ed community and local teachers in general. This event was heavy on apps and I'd like to be able to discuss with other local educators how they are using, supporting, instructing and learning with mobile devices. Brief summaries of the sessions I attended are below.

Opening Video: Blanca Duarte spoke about this video in her opening. Great opening video by the way of 6th grade student, Thomas Suarez, explaining why he makes apps at a recent TEDx event in California.

Session 1: David Warlick "The Nextbook" (via video chat)
- Interesting discussion with David about what a classroom would look like if there were no more traditional textbooks.
- Was an open discussion with some Q&A about some of the different tools that could be used to replace a traditional textbook. Some suggested that students could help write or develop the class "text", or whatever media form it takes. Others thought they need librarians as well to help students filter through web content. Would a class be limited by the knowledge within a teacher's head and the textbook?
- Educators need to really start getting a handle on use of mobile devices and help make these devices usable and meaningfully in an edu sense.
- David made a Wordle of the backchannel conversation
- My takeaway quote from David: "Great deal of Innovation happens in times of challenge."

Session 2: iCreate with Adam Bellow (@adambellow)
- Adam showed a few different apps and then invited others to come up and share the ones they like. Here's the list:
Show Me, Screen Chomp, A Web App, Popplet, Evernote Peek, Panorama 360, Voicethread, EduTecher, Drawing Pad, Writer's Studio, Mixel, Edmodo
- Lost of usability issues surface when discussing apps in school. Accounts needed? Logins? How to get the content out of the app? Sharable? Embeddable? Displayable? Import existing content?

The App Smackdown: Technical glitches with the iPad2 sharing option over Apple AirPlay and Apple TV caused a little disruption in the sharing of apps. A document camera at the podium would be a better option and permit anyone to share apps as the AirPlay option was only available for iPad2 folks. The ones mentioned I caught were:
Side by Side, Evernote, Good Reader, Book Creator, Chore Pad, Observatory

Session 3: ePortfolios and Mobile Devices Dr. Helen Barrett (via audio conf)
- NET plan has statement on student managed else learning portfolios
- Students take responsibility for them and their learning
- School centered portfolios v. student centered
- da Vinci as the ultimate portfolio creators (good analogy)
- Use of "digital paper" as a static portfolio needs to be enhanced
- Use tech in portfolios for links, archiving, digital storytelling, collaborating, publishing
- Portfolio as a process (workspace) or a product (showcase)?
- Create a collection of work, find a place to store it, journal it
- Mobile device is the personal learning environment of the net generation
- Storyrobe app to narrate images and video editing using iMovie and Splice on iOS device

Session 4: Roundtable discussion on management of BYOD
- Conversation never really stay on topic. Didn't discuss how to manage mobile devices in the sense of setup, install, security, rollouts, etc...

Closing: Congrats to all raffle winners ... I am again a raffle loser.

An archive of my tweets from the day is available for a limited time. Will end with this great quote from David Warlick:

I've now had some time to reflect on the Educause 2011 Conference and all of the sessions and keynotes I attended. What always stumps me after leaving a conference as large as this one is this: what am I supposed to do with all the information I've obtained at these conferences? How much of it can I share to make an immediate impact? How much of it fits within the institution where I currently work? How much of it can I use to rock the boat and continue to be, as one faculty member so eloquently stated, "the campus tech agitator"?

My overall conference impressions:
1. The city of Philadelphia needs some work (or help). In the immediate vicinity of the Convention Center are some very run down parts of town. This did not encourage exploring the city in downtime. I did have about half a dozen cheese-steaks though and every one of them was great!

2. The Convention Center was comfortable, wireless held up well, and distance between sessions was manageable. The use of QR Codes was everywhere, but after scanning a few and being directed to non-mobile versions of web sites, I lost interest. Some presenters even included a QR code on their summary or contact me slide at the end. In reality, that is not scannable with a smart phone camera from the middle of a large room. Just put a link instead.

3. The conference sent a mixed message about going green or paperless. While there were no post session paper evals to fill out, there was a printed conference guide/book as thick as some college texts.

4. Most sessions I attended were very good and I tried to pick from the Teaching and Learning track only. As with most other higher ed conferences I've attended, the use of slides to supplement a presentation was not the case. The slides were the presentation and many were just filled with way too much text, charts, etc. Simplify, summarize, show, and tell are what we need in face-to-face sessions. The audience can read the text and see all the data later. By the time you get to a 4:00 session, your brain is over stimulated. Seeing slide after slide of data and text at that point makes most people tune out.

5. Ah, the vendors. They are like vultures. Long winded sales pitches and for some at this event they had no understanding of what it is like in a classroom. My coworker and I joked that they needed to stay on thier black squared carpeted areas and stop venturing out in the pathways to "scan us for a free iPad". I only went into the exhibit hall twice and it was the same stuff I'd seen in June at EduComm. Higher ed tech on a conference vendor floor is: network/security/infrastructure stuff, classroom spaces stuff, lecture capture stuff, and LMSs, with lots of little guys scattered throughout. Nothing showcasing free or open source tools and you'll rarely see an actual person employed at an educational institution standing there along side a vendor to pitch it. They do case studies all the time, so why not? Let a faculty member sell me use of the tools or products instead of a company sales person.

6. The use of iPads was really popular and I saw lots of educators checking Twitter (archived hashtag with 25,000 tweets is here). However, I mostly saw educators using the iPad for what I call "non-conference multitasking" like reading the Wall Street Journal, checking out shoes on eBay, composing emails, playing Angry Birds and other fun "distractions". If it is any wonder why so many faculty think higher ed students will be distracted by mobile devices if they permit them in classes, they need to see how their peers handle use of these devices in an educational/professional setting. Let's lead by example here folks. I tried to strictly use the iPad for note taking in Evernote with the hope of making each note a blog post. It was just too tedious to type on the iPad without a keyboard. Also used Twitter app and Tweetdeck to manage backchannel, mobile version of Educause site which was slow but good, and Flickr app to follow hashtaged photos. Skype on iPad to chat with the kids back home worked well in hotel downtime.

7. The conference Twitter hashtag (#edu11) was very active, but I'd love to have some numbers on the amount of vendor tweets vs. those from educators. Someone want to analyze all that data?

I've summarized each of the sessions I attended and linked them below. Feel free to read each and comment. I attended two other sessions in which I did not take notes because either the session was not what I thought based on the listing in the conference program or it did not fit my needs.

Invisible or Remarkable: Opening Keynote with Seth Godin
Privacy in an Era of Social Media: Keynote with Danah Boyd (no notes - just link to session archive)
Engaging Faculty in Pedagogical Training
What Nonprofits and For-Profits Can Learn from Each Other About Teaching and Learning
Instructional Technologies
Researching Mobile Learning at ACU: Conclusions, Questions, and Future Directions
Implications of iPad in Higher Education
iPads in the Classroom: Use, Learning Outcomes, and the Future
Apps That Change Distraction to Discussion
As Learning Goes Mobile - Pew Internet Research
iPad Pilot Project: Lessons Learned at a Liberal Arts College

One immediate thought I had during all the sessions was that there is still this great digital divide among higher ed faculty. I can't wrap my brain around why some faculty "get it" and some don't in terms of use of technology to reach learning goals. I overheard a conversation between two English professors sitting next to one another. One says his students blog on a weekly basis to improve their writing skills and be able to interact with an audience while the other says she will never do that and blogs are shameless self-promotion.

What are your thoughts on #Edu11? What are your takeaways? Feel free to leave a comment.

As Learning Goes Mobile - Pew Internet Research - Lee Rainie, Director of Pew Internet Project
http://www.educause.edu/E2011/Program/FS15

Slides and research here

Apps That Change Distraction to Discussion - Purdue Univ  Kyle Bowen