The proliferation of technology in classrooms has made clear a reality with which many network administrators struggle: You can never have too much bandwidth.

In this age of one-to-one computing and “bring your own device” programs, distance learning and cloud-based applications, students, teachers and staff have come to expect that the network on which they rely during the school day will deliver the resources they need, when they need them. But making do with a patchwork network is no longer enough. As many school IT departments have discovered, at some point, the demands these emerging technologies exert on a network make a major overhaul imperative.

4. Your network isn’t secure. Schools are legally and morally obligated to secure private student data, including grades and personal information. Security breaches expose a school not only to potential legal action, but also to viruses and other malware that can destroy or damage the network and the files that administrators, teachers and staff rely on to do their jobs. Disruptions of any kind indicate that your network is vulnerable.

“If you aren’t aware of the traffic that’s passing through your network, and you don’t have visibility into where that traffic is going, then it’s probably time to think about upgrading and possibly adding some layers to the network,” Tauschek advises.

Often, district networks have more horsepower than their administrators realize, either because they aren’t configured properly or because they aren’t being used fully. “I call it the ‘Wizard of Oz effect,’ ” says Stein, the consultant. “Dorothy always had the capability to go home — she just had to click her heels together. But she didn’t know it.”

With the new contract, Hoboken’s Internet connections will increase from 50Mbps to 300Mbps. Crocamo also is upgrading the district’s firewall and web content filter so it can accommodate the faster speeds.

  Apostolos Koutropoulos
 University of Massachusetts
 Boston, MA 02125 USA
 a.koutropoulos@umb.edu

The devil is in the details and unfortunately the early literature on digital natives that built upon the work of Presky, Oblinger, Tapscott, Dede and Frand lacked that fine attention to detail; they seemed to rework the same old assumptions, and fit their data within the Weltsaschauung of the digital native proponents.

From a US context, in a post-No Child Left Behind USA, if our digital native learners aren’t engaged, they have no incentive to work around the problem and find a solution. In contrast, older learners, I would posit, are more engaged and thus do work at changing their approach in order to find solutions.

Effective instruction requires constant adjustment to the learner, reinforcing mastered concepts and holding out new concepts that are barely able to be mastered by the learner at that point in his or her concept knowledge trajectory. Computers can constantly evaluate and adjust to inputs in an efficient manner, providing personalized instruction. Computers can also track performance at a granular level and match learners with experts on the basis of fine-grained competencies for the purpose of targeted mentoring. Embedding these metrics within a networked environment facilitates the computer's information management capabilities across multiple characteristics of learning interactions and within a computer-mediated socialized network.

However, humans can better interpret a lack of understanding of the intermediate steps in a problem-solving process, and humans can offer complementary explanations easily adjusted based on feedback. Digital capture of these explanations can be archived for use by other students, and the quality of those digital artifacts can be verified by the performance of the student consumers, resulting in a collection of diverse and proven solutions.

Table 1. Instructional Design Approaches 

Julia E. Rodriguez
  Assistant Professor
 Information Literacy and Educational Technology Librarian
  Oakland University
  Rochester, MI 48309 USA
  juliar@oakland.edu 

Technology training has three simple but important components. Every device, application, and system needs to come with instructions on 

• Why it's useful.
• How to use it.
• How to use it to support teaching and learning.
 
 

If serious, formal training isn't part of your technology budget, don't worry much about the rest of it. The shiny things won't get used well anyway.

Consider, for example, the open scientific wikis launched by a few brave pioneers in fields like quantum computing, string theory and genetics (a wiki allows the sharing and collaborative editing of an interlinked body of information, the best-known example being Wikipedia).

Specialized wikis could serve as up-to-date reference works on the latest research in a field, like rapidly evolving super-textbooks. They could include descriptions of major unsolved scientific problems and serve as a tool to find solutions.

the concept of social network sites (SNSs) has emerged and such sites are now seen as a venue for collaboration to transpire. Boyd and Ellison (2007) have defined a social network site as a place on the Internet where people are able to:

 
• construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system,
• articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and
• view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.

In the survey, participants were asked how using Twitter has benefited them professionally. Four unique themes emerged from their responses:

 
• Access to resources
• Supportive relationships
• Increased leadership capacity
• Development of a professional vision

Users will be able to launch OpenClass from within Google Apps or access their Google applications from OpenClass, which, the company declared, has no hardware, licensing, or hosting costs.

"OpenClass has huge potential for higher education," said Adrian Sannier, senior vice president of Learning Technologies at Pearson. "OpenClass accelerates what technology will do for learning with a free, open and innovative platform that easily scales and lets students work via social media, with an intense focus on learning that elevates achievement."

OpenClass, the application will eventually provide tools to enable an instructor to import existing materials from "most of the major LMSes."

Once inside OpenClass, both student and faculty users can access e-mail, documents, and calendars.

The program has two primary feeds, "Activity" and "People," which show up within an individual's workspace, representing all of the courses he or she is in.

The state had provided a “virtual school allotment” since the 2009-10 school year that paid $400 for each student who took online network classes, Barrett said. The state is not funding the allotment this year and students’ families must pick up the cost, Barrett said.

“The decline in enrollment is directly because of that,” he said.

That barely covers paying the teacher for the work he or she does with the kids,” he said.

“We’re not making any money on it. It’s bare bones.”

Last year, the U.S. Department of Education released its National Education Technology Plan, which includes a proposal to use social networking as a platform for learning.

The plan urges educators to “leverage the learning sciences and modern technology to create engaging, relevant, and personalized learning experiences for all learners that mirror students’ daily lives and the reality of their futures.”