Today's schools and universities all have one thing in common: abundant technology access. Students do a majority of their homework online. They can earn an education from anywhere thanks to virtual classrooms and universities. The use of video-conferencing and distance learning have also become increasingly common methods of communicating lesson plans or instruction.
Each generation has learned with the technology it’s been given. Colonial kids wrote their lessons in simple wooden horn books. German teachers taught Albert Einstein his ABCs using chalk and a blackboard.
There is no magic to digital tools. Exceptional learning can happen with or without a [name your device of choice]. And yet there are numerous excellent reasons for today’s schools to champion modern technology in the classroom even without the rise of distance learning.
Hear from two IT leaders who have pushed EdTech in their districts and found the results to be 100 percent worth the effort. Here’s why technology is important in education—in their words. And learn the challenges so you can met them head on and provide a secure, reliable network for your EdTech initiatives to thrive.
The Importance of Technology in Education
1. Modern tech empowers students to take ownership of their education.
After Lisa Nelson of Douglass Independent School District rolled out a 1:1 Chromebook program for her 7-12 grade students, she said that the immediate feedback she received was that students were being empowered to invest in their own education. With devices at their fingertips and robust Wi-Fi available across campus, students now had “no excuse to not immediately find information,” said Lisa.
Giving students tools to actively participate in their learning ensures that the responsibility for learning isn’t just on teachers. Thanks to technology, students can play a bigger part in their own learning than they might realize.
2. Modern tech is essential for staying competitive.
Lisa believes helping students become digitally savvy prepares them for college and the business field. As Director of IT for a rural district located two hours northeast of Houston, Texas, she worked hard to implement a wireless infrastructure and fast Internet in her school, despite facing significant challenges due to their location off the beaten path.
“Our struggle is to stay competitive with other school districts who have more staff and more money,” she said. “We don’t want our students to be at a disadvantage. We try as best we can to stay current with whatever technology is best for our teachers and students.”
3. Using digital tools can drive down costs long-term.
From a physical perspective, technology can be incredibly cost-effective in the long run. Matt Federoff of Vail School District has seen this firsthand. As CIO, he oversees an entirely textbook-free district and has seen the cost benefits. At the high school level, “providing four years of traditional textbooks costs between $400 and $500,” but you can buy a student a Chromebook for less than $300, he said, making laptops a compelling alternative to paper textbooks.
4. Education technology often increases academic performance.
Matt says Vail School District is among the top five school districts in Arizona in terms of academic performance, despite diverse demographics, rapid growth over the last decade, and Arizona’s last-place position compared to other U.S. states with regards to the amount of per-student funding they receive. “With the thoughtful use of tech for instruction and driving down costs, we’ve been able to maintain really high academic performance, even while growing at an absurd rate,” he said.
5. Students (and teachers and parents) expect digital learning experiences.
“Pervasive, reliable wireless connectively” is the expectation of today’s teachers and students, so Matt’s IT team provides it—in every classroom, school bus, and corner of his district. Increasingly, younger teachers also expect to be using digital tools as part of their curriculum.
Devices are part of a student's world outside of the classroom, so incorporating them into education is simply a continuation of their everyday life, especially now with distance learning.
Are you championing the usage of modern tools in your school? If you’re facing opposition from stakeholders or old-school staff who are dubious that modern technology matters, try bringing some of these points to the table. No one ever said innovation was risk-free, but as many educators have found, it’s often worth the leap.
What IT Leaders Need to Know About EdTech
In this guide, find the information and inspiration you need to become an EdTech champion.
Education Network Monitoring Challenges
With this rise in education technology comes an increased need for network monitoring and security. An educational institution's technological resources would be worthless without a secure infrastructure. Student records could be hacked, bandwidth consumed, and online assignments left undone. There's no time for errors or outages when dealing with lesson plans, particularly in advanced fields like medicine or science, where video-conferencing is often critical to providing seamless and proper instruction.
As an example of this, The University of British Columbia knows just how important a secure, uninterrupted connection is for education. Their medical program assigns students to local hospitals and clinics in remote areas and provides instruction via video-conferencing. A reliable network connection is not just critical for lessons to go as planned, but it's also vital for classes to be delivered on time with a dependable network connection.
Here are four challenges to watch for:
1. Disparate Systems
No district, campus, or school is the same, and the platforms connecting to their networks can be wide ranging. Some people have PCs, while others have Macs. They may use Linux, they may use their mobile device, or they may use a desktop computer at the library. An education network has so many different types of devices trying to connect to it at all times that being able to effectively monitor networks and provide up-to-date information is critical.
2. Limited Budget
Another key factor for monitoring education networks is budget. Most institutions don’t necessarily have a large budget for IT spending, even as the need to monitor their infrastructure becomes more important than ever with the increase in virtual classrooms and distance learning. When education IT budgets are a concern, it’s crucial to find a competitively priced or free network monitoring tool that can still scale to monitor the largest, most complex networks... without breaking the bank.
3. Bandwidth Usage
With so many students accessing an education institution's network, bandwidth usage can easily be exceeded and cause slowdowns or outages if it’s not being monitored. Campuses should implement flows monitoring solutions that can provide granular traffic analysis on traffic flowing through and across their network. If necessary, they can also look into a way to provide content filtering so that certain sites that use up excessive bandwidth can be blocked or prevented.
4. Wide Area Networks (WANs)
Unlike smaller schools or many organizations, most universities have an vast wide area network or "WAN." A university may have multiple campuses across town. Within those campuses there are many buildings and tens of thousands of students connecting to their network. This presents a huge challenge to IT teams tasked with monitoring wide area networks: the networks are simply too large and complex. It would be impossible to monitor this kind of network manually—there are too many devices and connections.
Monitoring wide area networks requires network monitoring software that can identify any problematic devices or connections and alert your team before they fail or cause outages.
Network Monitoring for Education
To meet these challenges, IT pros turn to Intermapper for a reliable, user-friendly network mapping, monitoring, and alerting tool. Intermapper can effectively monitor large area networks—including all your campuses and locations—for less than many tools on the market.
Intermapper is a cross-platform, vendor-agnostic solution, meaning it works with disparate platforms and systems to monitor each device, regardless of its type. Intermapper can scan wide area networks, monitor all your devices in real-time, and alert you when bandwidth thresholds are about to be exceeded. That's why Intermapper is perfect for network monitoring in education. And it runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Developed at Dartmouth College in 2000, Intermapper was first used by IT professionals in a college setting so it's made for educational institutes. Whether for the K-12 or college/university market, Intermapper is the leading provider of network mapping and monitoring software for the education industry.
With Intermapper, you can set specific thresholds for numerous factors—like bandwidth—and receive alerts when those thresholds are exceeded. You can also take a closer look at the types of traffic flowing across and through your network with Intermapper Flows.
Monitor large networks with Intermapper or parcel out smaller subnets of your network. If you purchase a license to monitor 1500 devices, for example, and have over 5000, you can rotate the devices being monitored. If any of those devices drop, Intermapper will pick up the next 20 to replace it. This way, you can monitor minute details of a large area network in batches, while still keeping a watchful eye on the health of the network as a whole.
See For Yourself: Try Network Monitoring for Education
Network teams in higher education love how user-friendly, reliable, and intuitive Intermapper is. Download Intermapper and monitor 500 devices free for 30 days.
