More students need to study science, technology, math and engineering (or STEM) subjects and schools must have high-speed Internet service, says the U.S. Education Secretary.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Friday renewed the administration's call for super-fast broadband connections in schools and a greater focus on education in the STEM subjects of science, technology, engineering and math. Duncan's message underscores two initiatives the administration has undertaken, one to improve STEM education and another, ConnectED, that the White House launched in June with a goal of connecting 99 percent of the nation's schools and libraries to high-speed broadband service. "President Obama and I are both excited about the future of science, technology, engineering and math education -- the STEM fields, for short," Duncan said. "America has become a global leader in innovation through the genius and hard work of our scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs," Duncan said. "We'd like to see more young people studying in these fields and ultimately pursuing careers in them as well. And one of the ways we're trying to help is by working to make sure that all students have access to ultra-fast broadband Internet." "We want to make sure all students get access to the latest digital technologies, explore new ideas through online content and resources," Duncan added. CIO - By Kenneth Corbin
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VIEW REPORT ARCHIVES
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Schools Have Need for Internet Speed
 The White House's ConnectED initiative comes in response to a shortfall in broadband speeds in schools and libraries around the country. The administration reports that the average school has an Internet connection speed on par with the typical American household, but provides service to 200 times as many users. As a result, not quite 20 percent of teachers consider their school's Internet connection to be satisfactory.
The administration is asking the Federal Communications Commission to spearhead the five-year plan to boost broadband service at schools and libraries to a minimum of 100 Mbps, with a goal of 1 Gbps. That initiative figures to draw extensively on public-private partnerships among businesses, states, school districts and community organizations.
Separately, the Department of Education is tasked with working with schools to develop and improve training programs for teachers involving the use of technology in the classroom to improve student performance.
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Robust broadband connectivity is another prerequisite to implementing a rich digital learning environment at any school. The key to delivering sufficient connectivity is estimating current and future demand to ensure that schools have enough bandwidth capacity to serve their student body, faculty, and staff.
As schools consider the various applications that will be used such as Internet research, multimedia streaming, online assessments and interactive digital textbooks, they must keep in mind both the bandwidth that is needed for those specific applications as well as the type of connectivity that is available in the surrounding area.
Forecasting and supplying network bandwidth is an
ongoing process and schools should attempt to design
their networks in a way that allows for non-disruptive
expansion and growth.
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Determining bandwidth requirementsSufficient broadband bandwidth is necessary to ensure adoption, use and effectiveness of digital learning environments. Insufficient broadband bandwidth will interrupt learning and  instruction, causing teachers and students to fall back to 20th Century learning methods and abandon new technologies. Peak demand on a per user basisA school must determine the bandwidth needed to meet the maximum simultaneous (i.e., "peak") demand on a per user basis. This should be regularly monitored so that improvements can be made in a timely way. For example, if a school or district is implementing a digital learning platform that relies heavily on video delivered to a student device, the school can approximate the maximum percentage of its students and faculty streaming a video at a given time (e.g. 50%) multiplied by the minimum bandwidth required to stream that content (e.g. 756 kbps, or kilobits, per second). In this example, if a school has 1,000 students and faculty, the maximum bandwidth needed would be 500 mbps (megabits per second) delivered to the school (1,000 x 50% x 756 kbps = 378 mbps).
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SCHOOL LEVEL DIFFERENTATION
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Keep in mind that not all schools need the same bandwidth.
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 An easy way to determine a school's bandwidth needs is to base requirements on the projected amount of technology use the school will have and on enrollment figures. Many school districts operate a hub and spoke singular network where all the school's applications and internet access are housed at the district datacenter (the hub). From there, the datacenter connects to each individual school via the WAN (Wide Area Network). Because all of the spoke connections come into the WAN connection at the datacenter, that particular connection must have the highest throughput and schools should look at the oversubscription rate they can tolerate on that datacenter WAN connection. Schools can determine the oversubscription rates they can tolerate by analyzing network reports that show average and peak utilization on WAN circuits. The oversubscription rate will influence the end user experience with the application or content. Consider a district that is made up of elementary schools with less than 800 students, middle or junior high schools with enrollment between 800 and 1500, and high schools with enrollment greater than 1500. The current WAN bandwidth design for this district would be elementary schools connected to the district WAN at 100 mbps, middle schools connected to district WAN at 500 mbps and high schools connected to the WAN at 1gbps (gigabit = 1000 mb). |
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