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.

“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.

Most school districts have only a few IT specialists who are often responsible for both the central office systems and local site networks. What’s more, CoSN’s survey found that a majority of Chief Technology Officers in schools earn about half of the going salary in the private sector. They’re faced with a huge task that will affect the learning of hundreds of children, but they’re understaffed, under-resourced and could make a lot more money elsewhere.

DEN is trying to relieve some of that load by compiling best practices and advice that will be housed on a website. The first tools should be available in June, and DEN hopes to expand its offerings to include a community forum so that IT leaders across the country can learn from each other as they go through the process.

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One of the biggest concerns for schools is the quality and security of the network. Another is accommodating the needs of various devices that students and teachers use to access the network, hoping to make all connections solid. “In the network, we have to think of how to get Internet access to a mobile device and how to do it securely,” Atkinson-Shorey said.

One thing they’re considering is more cloud based computing, but that can come with challenges too. “If we move resources into the cloud it’s easier for wireless devices to have access, but it may not meet the learning needs of students and staff,” Atkinson-Shorey said. Many schools are trying to move ahead on many technological fronts simultaneously and they don’t realize how much bandwidth they’ll need.

BYOD policies have been touted as money savers, but in informal surveys Atkinson-Shorey has found that most students bring more than one device to school at a time. Demands on the network might be far greater than anyone imagined.

Another big concern is making sure that everyone, no matter what device they’re using, gets the same speedy and reliable connection, which could hinder learning and affect the outcome of a student’s test. “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,” Atkinson-Shorey said.

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One of the main services DEN will try to provide is a spending resource so districts know just how much they can expect to pay to move online. The tool will compare and contrast different tech models, taking into account the tech requirements for BYOD, laptop carts, or computer labs.

“Early adopters went through all this the hard way, but there’s no reason for all of us to have to do that,” Atkinson-Shorey said.

The initiative is a boost for IT administrators at a time when social media networks are full of concerns that schools won’t be able to provide adequate broadband access in time for implementation goals of the Common Core. Some states are even seeking to delay implementation until they can get adequate tech support in place. As with all new launches, there will probably be glitches as schools role it out. The question will be whether schools are given a break if the technology doesn’t perform.

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 additional strains on resources, so that even if a library or school has high-speed broadband, a user experiences dial-up-like speeds.

The FCC has made broadband access the focus of some of its efforts over the last few years, arguing for its importance to the U.S. economy and education. It’s pushing for better access across the board, but also recognizing the importance of high-speed Internet specifically at schools and libraries.

Universities tend to have better-than-average speeds, and the FCC is urging these schools to help extend these speeds to the communities around them. The agency also wants to make sure that access to broadband at school extends to the home.

But this is still a long way off, if you consider another recent report from the Internet content delivery company Akamai, which reveals that the U.S. ranks 13th in the world in broadband adoption, trailing behind a number of European and Asian countries. Akamai released its quarterly State of the Internet report this week detailing the amount of traffic, speed, and penetration of the Internet throughout the world, including broadband and mobile access and usage.

The Netherlands unseated South Korea this quarter for the country with the highest broadband connectivity, with some 68% of its population having access to Internet at speeds higher than 5 Mbps.

Coming in at number 13 isn’t that impressive a showing for the U.S., but broadband adoption here has for the first time broken the 40% threshold, with 42% of Americans having access to high-speed Internet.

Why is knowing broadband speed important? It gives us insight into how much access to the online world Americans have. Broadband is a crucial piece of infrastructure for communication. At this point, there are plenty of Web sites and online services that simply can’t be uploaded or fully accessed with just dial-up Internet access anymore. Broadband is required to stream movies, to use VOIP (voice over Internet protocol) services like Skype, to shop and surf and, of course, study. And even with broadband capabilities, low Internet speeds make all these things incredibly frustrating.

Akamai’s statistics are averages for countries and states, and in some ways these averages obscure some of the vast differences within geographic areas. Within states, there are cities and neighborhoods where Internet speeds and broadband penetration are high; there are places where they’re frightfully low.

On a state-by-state level, Rhode Island overtook Delaware this past quarter as the state with the fastest average connection speed: 8.2 Mbps. That’s up 21% from the last quarterly report. Delaware’s average is 8.1 Mbps, followed by DC at 7.5 Mpbs, and Utah at 7 Mbps. The slowest state: Arkansas, with an average of 3.3 Mbps.

Interested in learning more about your city’s and your local schools’ broadband speeds? You can visit the Department of Education’s interactive map here for more details.