ResearchReflection

I will be starting a new job in a new school/district this fall. I will be the teacher-librarian for a grade 7 & 8 middle school. This school has two Internet servers, one that is blocked from any type of public use and houses all district computers, storage drives, and network. The other server is open and accessible by any device; however this bit of information is not publicized and students are not allowed to use any devices while at school, unless it is during lunch time. Previously, no devices were allowed in the library - ever. For this research project, I decided to take on the topic of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) to see how others are implementing or criticizing the approach.

After reading journals and articles about the topic, I am even more intrigued. I feel like my new district is one of the few in our area that has the option to allow personal devices, but they are not taking advantage of it. I hope to use the quick video clip that I created for my research story as a way to introduce the idea to my administrative and leadership team as a way to begin the conversation about adopting a BYOD policy. What a great way to engage students, there would be much less a divide between learning at home vs. learning at school.

To create my project, I used PowerPoint to organize images from the Flickr Creative Commons. I then uploaded my presentation to BrainShark and converted the file into a video with background music and automatic slide advancement. I really like the BrainShark program - it takes a lot of the hassle out of PowerPoint animations and timing.