[Year 12 Its] RE: [Year 12 IPM] Digital storagedevices-Acceptable usage policy

[Russell Woodford]

Our school has had portable USB drives drives on its booklist for a couple of years, and we encourage students to use these as secondary backup (in addition to network drives) as well as an easy method of getting work to and from home (we also have e-lockers on our proprietary intranet where students can save work and retrieve it from home).

We make it clear (in writing) that items brought to school are the responsibility of the student.  Most of our students have mobile phones at school.  If they get caught using them in class there is a simple procedure that seems to be working well - the student has to take them to reception immediately and they get a receipt to show their teacher on return to class.  The phone can be collected at the end of the day and discipline points are issued.  Many students also use iPods and other music playeres that double as storage devices.  In all cases it is up to the classroom teacher to decide when and where these can be used.  Quite a few staff are happy for students to listen to music while working on creative tasks (e.g. in art and design subjects) while others only allow them to be used for data storage i.e. no earbuds.

Our LOTE teachers use iPods for recording and playback, and make audio materials available on our network.  Music staff will be doing the same once we have sorted out some copyright issues.  We are about to conduct a trial of more extensive Podcasting via our intranet (Studywiz).  One of the things we will investigate is recording important lessons and uploading them to the intranet - when students login their 'home' page will list all new resources, and if they have an iPod connected it will automatically be updated with the latest podcasts for each student (tagged by class).  Those who don't have a plug-in device will still be able to download the podcasts through iTunes.

The main problem with portable USB drives is that a lot of students forget them and leave them plugged in  - it isn't always easy to trace the owner and is one more thing to deal with on a busy day. So far nobody in my class has left an iPod for me!

As the distinctions between devices become more and more blurred it will be important for schools to be smarter about how they deal with these issues.  It still seems that a lot of teachers worry about what students might DO with a device, rather than how the device can be harnessed to facilitate teaching and learning.  Cameras in phones are now the norm - soon it will be hard to find a phone that doesn't play MP3s, and then consumers will demand greater storage on phones.  Already most "high-end" phones have a memory card slot, and I think that in a couple of years our students will carry one device that is a phone, camera, music player and data storage - plus a couple of other features we haven't even considered yet (e.g. there is already an iPod that reads data from the right brand of running shoe so it's a pedometer and heart rate monitor as well!).  It would be great if we  can think of some teaching innovations to make the best use of these multi-purpose devices, and of
  some ways of ensuring equitable access for all our students.



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Russell Woodford
Learning Technologies Coordinator
Sacred Heart College Geelong
rwood at shc.melb.catholic.edu.au
http://web.shc.melb.catholic.edu.au/music/auralonline.html

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