My school division lets individual schools set their own mobile device policy. I intend to reference our former policy (up until 2 years ago) and our current policy.
Our former policy stated that mobile devices were banned from use in the building except for lunch and spares. Any students using a device during class time, or in the hallway during break, would have the device confiscated in the office for the remainder of the day. This policy made mobile learning impossible. The purpose of this rule was designed as a knee-jerk reaction to unfiltered device use beforehand. This policy was intended to quell distractions and attempt to make the learning environment more productive.
Our current policy states that mobile device use is at the individual teacher’s discretion. Our administration has said that as long as the device is being used for an educational purpose, it is ok to use in class. New administration has implemented this new policy for a couple of reasons. First, it takes the police work out of the teachers’ hands. We no longer have to roam the halls attempting to “catch” students using their devices at inappropriate times. As well, as we have a shortage of devices (laptops, iPads, etc.) in the school, the staff felt a need to leverage the technology already in the students’ pockets to ease the stress of over booking devices.
My course design has changed considerably due to these changes in policy. Where I used to have stand-alone research projects in my science courses, I now have my students perform ad-hoc research. When a topic comes up I can have my students spend five minutes Googling the topic and we can have an intelligent discussion, where under the old policy I would have to shelf the question and bring it up at a later date.
Specific rules necessary for leveraging mobile devices involve both pedagogy and logistics. To begin with, any sites that I recommend to my students must be mobile-friendly. This is becoming less of an issue than it was even a year ago, as most websites are designed to be both desktop and mobile: that is, the website auto-detects the browser accessing it and tailors the display to that device. I also must make sure that my students understand what appropriate use of the device is. Gaming, texting, checking Facebook are but a few examples of inappropriate use that must be educated rather than having a blanket policy mandating against device use.