Taking Advantage of Student Ownership

One of the ways to mitigate device damage and repair costs is through student “ownership.”  By ownership, we are not talking about BYOD, with its implications for socioeconomic inequity.  “Ownership” is taking advantage of an opportunity to engage students in having a device which is assigned to them only, and, depending on state law and local policy, a device they can take with them when they move on.

One district I recently visited had an excellent example of this.  All fifth graders had a chromebook assigned to them, which they would be able to keep after grade eight.  For most of the first two years, the devices were in a classroom cart, with the student clearly identified on the device.  This gave the students plenty of time to develop appropriate practices for “care and feeding”, and also for the school to engage parents in best practice discussions for the time when the students would be taking the devices home.  Throughout seventh and eighth grade, the students brought them to school every day, and when they moved on to high school, they got to keep the device.

There are some ways to maximize value students place on the ownership.  An easy way is to allow them to personalize their own device, with appropriate stickers, for example. This is what we used to do with textbooks in the last century…we had to keep them covered but were allowed to use a brown bag cover and show our individuality in an appropriate way.  Another way is to involve students in decision-making processes about care and feeding, rules and responsibilities, cybersecurity and digital citizenship. They can plan training sessions for their parents on setting home expectations, school expectations and how to use the device to access school resources like a parent portal.

Schools will need to develop clear administrative procedures for issues that may arise (loss, theft, malicious damage).  The tech department will need to establish clear incident tracking processes, collaborate with administration on appropriate procedures for incident response, and use the data to determine program improvements, such as hardware specs (hinge quality) and other practices to improve hardiness of the devices (good cases).   Throughout this it is important to keep in mind that the device is akin to the pencil and textbook of years past, and having a logical consequence of taking away the learning tool is a self-defeating process.

Continuous review and tracking of device issues will help the tech support team respond to issues as they arise, and determine if additional measures might be necessary to re-emphasize proper procedures.  When we had an uptick in repair incidents, we engaged the student newspaper and administration in an awareness campaign, as well as looking for any proximate causes. When implemented, over time it is reasonable to expect that loss will be reduced to 1 or 2%.  Overall, taking advantage of student ownership is a great way to reduce costs in one-to-one device implementations.