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Finding Solutions for Tech Troubles In Schools

April 11, 2013 | 8:00 AM | By

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With the onset of the Common Core State Standards, which teachers are expected to implement next year, and the growth of blended learning, the role of digital resources both for instruction and assessment has come under close scrutiny. The quickly shifting landscape is leaving many Internet Technology directors worrying that they won’t be able to meet the demand for fast and reliable Internet service.

The Consortium for School Networking‘s (CoSN) recently surveyed IT leaders and found their top three priorities are Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies, assessment readiness, and broadband access. All of these priorities hinge upon one thing – lots of bandwidth.

Recognizing the substantial challenge facing many school districts, CoSN has launched the Designing Education Network (DEN) initiative to compile best practices for how to quickly and carefully build up IT infrastructure.

“If you’re first grader and you are learning to read and you’ve got a screen that takes 90 seconds to load, you may not be able to sit still that long.”

“One of the reasons we want to identify best practices and vendor neutral resources is because districts don’t have resources to hire consultants for research and development,” said Denise Atkinson-Shorey, project director for DEN. In fact, 80 percent of school districts predict they will have flat or declining IT budgets for the next school year. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Big Ideas, Digital Tools, broadband, Common Core State Standards, CoSN

Schools and Libraries Still Living in Dial-Up Age

October 27, 2011 | 10:33 AM | By

Brad Parbs

Remember the agony of waiting for a Web site to load, before broadband was widely available? According to a recent survey, a lot of American schools and libraries are still living in that era.

Only 35% of public libraries have broadband speeds between 1.5 Mbps and 10 Mbps (a rather broad range); 34.7% have speeds lower than 1.5 Mbps, and only 24.9% have broadband speeds higher than 10 Mbps, according to data from the American Library Assocation’s Public Library Funding & Technology Access Survey (PDF). As a comparison, Netflix says that an Internet connection of at least 1.5 Mbps is necessary to stream videos at the lowest possible quality.

But keeping up with the requisite Internet speed isn’t the only challenge that schools and libraries face. With the increasing demands for data, there are also challenges of bandwidth. Multiple users on multiple machines — whether accessing the Internet through hardwire or wireless — put Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Digital Tools, Akamai, broadband, fcc

Weekly News Roundup

March 25, 2011 | 11:11 AM | By

Flickr: WilliaC

  • A federal judge threw out a proposed settlement between publishers, authors, and Google Books this week, throwing into question the future of Google’s massive efforts to digitize the world’s literature and make it available for search. The proposed settlement went “too far,” according to the judge, giving Google too much control over “orphan works,” those books whose copyrights aren’t known. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Jen Howard has a good write-up of this long legal saga.
  • Inkling, the makers of a textbook app for iPad, has raised a round of funding that includes a minority investment from the two largest publishers of educational content in the world: Pearson and McGraw-Hill. Inkling’s app re-envisions how textbook content should appear on tablets, making them far more rich and interactive than simply converting the text to a digital format.
  • Chegg, the largest textbook rental company in the world, announced this week that it was expanding its offerings to include course selection and homework help information. The additions stem from two acquisitions the company made last year — CourseRank and Cramster — and it’s an effort, according to Chegg, to make its services more personalized.
  • One of the largest publishers of children’s books in the world, Scholastic, reported a worse-than-expected quarterly loss this week. Despite an influx of federal education technology funds, profits were down for the company, in part because of budget pressures for schools and families.
  • California Connects, a federally funded program aimed at increasing digital literacy and broadband access among under-served communities launched this week, as part of a multi-year effort to address California’s digital divide.
  • The FCC and Department of Education unveiled a special version of the National Broadband Map that reveals the availability and speed of broadband at U.S. schools. According to the data, about two-thirds of schools surveyed have broadband speeds less than 25 Mbps. Most schools need a connection speed of about 100 Mbps for every 1000 students.
FILED UNDER: broadband, california connects, chegg, digital-divide, google books, inkling, scholastic, weekly news roundup