In this day and age, the vast majority of teenagers, if not primary age children, already own some kind of mobile device, whether it be a smart phone or an iPad, or some other tablet. Our philosophy at Polam Hall School is that we want to empower pupils and teachers so they can utilise these mobile devices for educational reasons, and not just treat them as entertainment centres.

For Polam Hall, therefore, the philosophy is one of BYOD2S – Bring Your own Device to School. The advantage to the School is that the devices are owned by the pupils, the School just focuses on infrastructure and educational use. The advantage to the pupils is that they can have a device of their own choice, not one imposed upon them by the School.

This is a particularly significant point, because mobile devices are designed from the ground up as personal devices, not as communal ones. With ownership comes familiarity and personalisation, enabling the individual to have the software and apps of their choice.

Last year at school, we did host an ‘Apple Inspires’ event and we are looking to see if we can repeat that this year. Not because we want to become an Apple school, but because Apple provide this kind of service, and at the moment Apple have some of the best apps available in the market place.

In this day and age the most important feature that any mobile device has is access to the internet. Polam Hall has a ‘Google Apps for Education’ account which gives all pupils and staff access to Gmail accounts (all our polamhall.net addresses are Gmail), to 25gb of online storage, and of course to Google documents. All of this can be accessed via any mobile device that has internet access, via wifi or a 3G mobile phone connection.

The main considerations Inevitably price is a major consideration. If you can get a capable smartphone or a tablet on a good deal, it might be just as well to follow the deal. Do bear in mind that your children will regard the device as a communications and entertainment tool first and foremost, so do make sure it ticks those boxes (mostly they do of course) or it will stay in the box.

Battery life is an important factor in school and this is where smartphones and tablets score well over laptops and netbooks. The latter have the advantage of a proper keyboard, but battery life is much less than with a tablet and they are much heavier. As mentioned already, there are network security issues with laptops and netbooks, so the Network Manager does not provide network access for laptops, except to boarders.

Screen size seems to be less of an issue with the pupils than with adults, as does the size of the onscreen or real keyboard – a 12 year old will probably find a tablet keyboard much easier than most adults for example. That said, screen size is most important when browsing the web. This is where the iPhone and many other smartphones score over the older Blackberry style phone.

Touch screen technology is more or less universal now; the latest Blackberry models have them as well. It is certainly a feature that helps make a device easier to use and the pupils seem to find them very intuitive.

Cameras are really useful in School, for use out and about, or in class to record what is on the whiteboard for example. All modern phones and mobile devices have them and for educational purposes the quality of these cameras is perfectly adequate.

An organiser of some description should be at the top of any app list. Being able to programme in your son or daughter’s timetable and other appointments and meetings, is useful as well as homework deadlines. This functionality could be particularly important for a child with organisational difficulties arising from a specific learning difficulty. Although Google Docs gives online access to their version of all the office favourites, you might consider apps to replicate this for offline working such as Pages, Keynote and Numbers.

I have two of these three for example and I use these for more serious work where the functionality in Outline+ (my preferred notebook style app) is more limited. That said I do have a Windows based laptop so more than often than not anything produced on my iPad is synchronised to MS OneNote from Outline+ or emailed to my laptop where I finish it off and for me this is a very good combination.

Some staff recommendations Mr Mountain’s preferences: I personally use my iCloud Calendar, contacts, notes, reminders etc constantly (especially calendar and reminders!) and would really miss them if they weren’t there!

Which apps to recommend can be tricky – I’ve looked at longs lists of app choices and ‘best ofs’ in the past but personal choice often takes precedence over others’ recommendations. However, as a musician, Garage Band, Ampkit, Music Studio and SoundHound are some of my favourites and speaking generally iMovie, Dragon Dictation and Art Authority are great. Perhaps what I would miss more than anything else is Dropbox which I use daily so I can transfer and work on stuff either on my Apple devices or my PC.

Mrs Turvey is a big fan of Pages and Keynote, both from the AppStore and I have both of those as well. She also uses the BBC News app regularly.

In general terms smart phones or tablets will give the pupils everything they need in school on a day to day basis. They synchronise with laptops and PCs very well and any compatibility issues are usually easily overcome, mostly by saving work files in the right format. Data transfer is easily done by email and this is how I operate, for example, switching between my iPad and my school laptop.