7.8% of students will receive financial assistance or participate in the school use program for the BYOL initiative.
Graphic courtesy of Kathleen Dooley.
Next fall, the high school will officially launch the Bring Your Own Laptop (BYOL) program. In this 1:1 learning initiative, students will bring their own laptop to school every day.
The BYOL program builds off of the 1:1 program at the middle school, in which students bring iPads to school every day, as well as the 1:1 program at the elementary schools, in which fifth graders use individual iPads at school every day, but do not bring them home.
WPS Director of Technology, Kathleen Dooley, hopes the BYOL program helps students to have more independence with their device.
“Students are not going to be managed by teachers, so now they’re more independent learners. They’re going to learn how to use the technology to delve into their areas of specialty as well as be able to support their own independent use of the machine,” Dooley said.
Another goal of the BYOL program is to lighten students' backpacks. Ideally, the laptop will replace some textbooks, notebooks, and binders students currently carry.
The laptops that students use next year must all match certain specifications to ensure that students can download the necessary software for their classes.
Although almost 80 percent of students plan to bring their own laptop next year, students can also purchase a laptop from the school or participate in a school-use program.
To be able to effectively utilize the technology in their classrooms, teachers participated in workshops run by other teachers and worked individually with Ranjani Sriram, an instructional technology specialist at the high school, to set up their own Canvas sites.
A major change with the BYOL program will be the wider use of Canvas in place of Google Classroom, which many teachers currently use.
“Canvas is a more sophisticated learning management system than Google Classroom, and it’s used in a lot of colleges in the Boston area,” Dooley said. “The experience of using Canvas will be a great preparation for students going on to college as well as just learning how to operate in a blended learning environment, which is partially online and partially face to face.”
Despite the preparation for next year, the Technology department and students have concerns about some of the distractions that could arise.
“When I look around in class, I see a lot of people doing other things on their computer, so now that everyone will have laptops, people will be more tempted to be doing other things in class,” Arianna Baffa ’20 said.
The Technology department plans to combat this issue by making it a point on the BYOL guidelines poster that will hang in every classroom to remind students of the expectations regarding their use of laptops. They also encourage teachers to walk around their classroom to see what students are doing.
Prachi Kelkar ’20 brings her own laptop to school every day and thinks the tool is very helpful.
“I think that it may be hard for some people to adapt, but since everybody will have a computer and since we’re living in such a technology based age, I think it’s going to be beneficial to students,” Kelkar said.