Trying to figure out the best way to write a policy regarding a brand new program can be quite difficult for one person to tackle. Getting a group who truly understands the schools' community is ideal. A mixture of teachers, parents and an administrator is preferable. The pressure of deciding what is appropriate and what is not regarding the usage of devices on campus can be challenging. Be happy to be taking this new step and establishing a great foundation of BYOD at your site for years to come.
Implementing BYOD at my site, sparked an idea to establish a technology committee. This committee is now the backbone of anything technology-related at the school. The technology committee is a safe place to bring ideas to the table regarding how technology is being integrated at school, home and in the classroom. It is a mixture of parent's, teachers, and student representatives. This committee talks about what types of technology is needed for example, projectors and printer inventory for the classrooms. The tech committee also established having a computer repair person come out once a month to help fix broken district ChromeBooks.
The most beneficial part about establishing a technology committee was their help on policy-making guidelines for the BYOD program. The perspectives of parents and teachers must be honored in a safe place, so the issues discussed can lead to a comprehensive school policy.
In the case of my school district, the parents and teachers both agreed that our goal is to teach our students responsibility with devices from transporting them in their backpack, to doing research in the classroom appropriately. Once the committee was happy with where the policy was headed, we asked the student representatives to look it over and give their feedback.
Here is what our notes at our first policy-making meeting looked like. It is clear we were able to agree on some great ideas, but this was just the backbone of the policy that we created.