Wireless and school environments

Choosing a wireless network presents many of the same challenges as choosing a sports facility for multiple uses. You want to get the most use out of your investment for all the sporting interests of the students, and to try and anticipate future uses. The aim of this document is not to discuss wireless products, but rather what can be done with them.

Government Policy and School Development Plan

A large influence on the uses of wireless, particularly in England, is Government Education Policy. Various initiatives have been placing laptops in the hands of teachers and pupils alike, and now the Harnessing Technology fund is pushing for Internet connectivity for those computers. Couple this with schools dedicating more and more of their ICT budget to buy laptops or netbooks for students, and you have network access becoming central to an increasing number lessons across the curriculum.

Government Policy is not limited to teaching and learning, but also school management. Directives are currently in place making the provision of real time data on attendance and pupil attainment an ICT priority in the next two years. This has to be collected and administered without additional burden on teaching staff.

Couple the Government directives with the schools own strategy for developing teaching and learning, and you have the challenge your ICT systems must meet. All of the above technical challenges can be met effectively over a reliable wireless network, using the systems and technology outlined below:

Mobile Classrooms

For schools with limited budget or limited ability to provide wireless due to physical constraints within the campus, a mobile classroom solution can provide the greatest access to technology for the most students. A mobile solution is a laptop trolley, on casters, containing a set of mobile computers and a wireless solution. Simply wheel it into the teaching space, plug the wireless system into a network point, distribute the mobile computers and start the session. Key features for this type of solution are:

• Speed of logon for mobile computers
• Speed and throughput of wireless network access
• Battery charging cycles maintaining maximum battery life
• Ease of transport and meeting of Health and Safety guidelines
• Simple management of the mobile devices for ICT staff

The key limitation of a solution like this is if you have too many mobile units in one area, 4 classrooms for example, the wireless starts to conflict and a fixed system would be a better solution.

Flexible Learning Spaces

New school building programs and a move to cross-curricular group work is creating new ICT challenges around flexible learning spaces. Sometimes they need to be used for quite formal lessons using mobile computers, other times it can be physical group work. Any kind of cabling simply won’t meet the needs of the varied activities taking place, but there are some considerations with a wireless solution:

• What is the most data hungry activity you will want to put into the space? This will affect the speed and capacity of the wireless system you will need in place.
• What is the maximum number of mobile computing devices you will need to support in the space? Leading you to capacity questions on a wireless system.
• Will users of the space need network connectivity as they move round? Raising the need for roaming in the wireless solution
• Are we dealing a project done in phases, with wireless coverage being phased in over time? If so, the solution will need to scale to the eventual size you need it to be, and not degrade below your minimum performance needs for effective teaching and learning.

Wireless Registration

Wireless registration is a well documented and explored concept in education, but schools who have implemented it have had wildly differing experiences. A clear influence on its use and uptake is the management culture within the school, but there are also some clear technology considerations. The reliability and coverage of the wireless network has to support the efficiency of the registration system, or the system falls flat.

If attendance and the distribution of associated data are not a priority within your school from a strategic point of view, it still may come to the fore as you need to consider how the data will be quickly fed into the VLE for updating parent and guardians in time for 2010.

Wireless CCTV

Wireless CCTV on an appropriate wireless network becomes a proactive incident management tool and deterrent. This is achieved by both the flexible placement of cameras and the implementation of speakers on the cameras. This allows school management to interject in incidents as they happen, and to adapt their control over the students when they are not under teacher supervision. These systems can also be combined with gate control systems, and our next topic RFID tagging.

Incident support staff can also have personal cameras for attending calls for assistance. Providing a deterrent to behavior issues and an audit trail for the actions taken.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)

RFID takes the most useful features of GPS tracking and barcodes, making them available as a low cost tracking and identification solution. A very small-scale microchip and antenna can be placed on or in devices, which can be read over a wireless network giving the following facilities to name a few:

• Access control cards for doors, lockers and technology
• Pass cards which can be location tracked anywhere within the wireless coverage
• Asset tracking for security, but also in practical terms of questions like “where did the projector cart go?”
• Call devices that can identify the location of the person calling for assistance
• Bulk registering of loan equipment in and out

Handheld VoIP Telephony

Free, wireless telephony from anywhere within the wireless coverage on campus. It leaves very little excuse for communications issues, however there are a couple of considerations for the wireless system:

• The wireless system will need to support roaming between access points
• Wireless coverage will need to be consistent across the areas on campus that you want the system to work
• Your ICT provision will need to investigate the current phone system to see if it can be integrated with IP phones

Wireless projection and multimedia streaming

Wireless multi media projectors are proving to be a popular and cost effective alternative to electronic whiteboards, particularly in secondary schools. With the ability to control the projector from a wireless computer anywhere on the network, there are flexibility and class control advantages. It is also possible to control multiple projectors at once, providing functionality for public notices, administering cover or group work, and flexible learning spaces.

It is not just projector signals that can be delivered wirelessly, but any streaming multi media such as video resources. This provides opportunities for personalized learning with students choosing the content appropriate to their current attainment level. However, there are some considerations about the limitations of the wireless system:

• Does it have the speed and capacity to handle multimedia services as well as the other things you wish to achieve with it?
• Can you separate the multimedia traffic, so it does not swamp the whole network?
• Can the network support streaming on the move?

Access for personal devices?

The harnessing technology fund has access for personal devices as a core aim. The use of students and teachers own equipment poses several security and performance issues.

• Does the wireless system allow you to simply implement the BECTA guidelines on wireless security?
• The standards governing wireless causes the speed of the network to slow down to accommodate the slowest device on the network. This is like the speed limit on a road being set by the speed of the slowest vehicle. So does the wireless network have the ability to have “different” lanes moving at different speeds?