West Lothian Council has a dedicated anywhere, anytime learning (AAL) channel that is designed to enable a BYOD (bring your own device) model across their school estate. Although this resource/service is available to all schools across West Lothian a process has been put in place by the central team and this must be engaged with by any school who wishes to have their AAL channel switched on. Laura Compton from the central team at West Lothian explained that the focus of their work was all about impact on learning and ensuring better outcomes for learners. To achieve this objective any school which wished to access their AAL channel would need to work in partnership with them to develop a strategy for learning that would make best use of any web-enabled devices that came into the school.

West Lothian Council: The Learning Strategy Laura Compton discusses the need for strategic planning by a school to take place prior to the AAL channel being switched on.

Integral to the jointly authored learning strategy  is a shared understanding that the focus is not on the device or the apps that may be available but rather on the rich learning opportunities that can be enabled by access to such technology. There is also an emphasis on ensuring that these learning opportunities are not straight-jacketed by a school that wants to be overly controlling in the management of the resource, a control that may lead to everyone having the same resources and apps on their device. They were adamant that a focus on controlling the device and subsequently the learning in this way would not lead to any sense of culture or transformational change within the school.

We need to talk about learning and not about devices.

In order to create the conditions for any positive change to begin to happen Laura Compton argued that the energy needed to be moved away from ideas of managing devices and wholly channeled into ensuring  that the focus was on providing quality learning at every opportunity.