I have had two great opportunities to talk about Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) to support student learning — at the Brock U.Teaching with Technology Showcase (Brock U Faculty of Education) and at the Educon 2.4 event.

The discussions covered considerable territory – benefits, challenges and implications for both pre-service and existing teacher training. In my organization, BYOD is certainly a strategy intended to augment access and not replace Board owned equipment. From an IT perspective, building the right infrastructure with sufficient capacity is a critical path forward to support student learning.

There is certainly a wide range of devices that could support learning. I have been pondering the desired functionality needed in any device to support student learning. Here is my initial take on a function list.

Notes/read:  take notes, read common file formats such as pdf and ebook files,

Web enabled: browse web (consume info, research), bookmark, interact with online databases, RSS

Share/Collaborate: write/publish a blog, support wiki use, google docs etc

Digital StoryTelling: capture audio, video, combine with text

Communicate: email, support for standard Social Media tools (FB/Twitter/G+) etc.

Other: good battery life, strong wifi signal

I need your feedback. How thorough is my list? What is missing? Should anything come off the list? What should be added?

Please leave a comment with your ideas, or share an idea with me on Twitter.

~Mark