It's interesting. I was just discussing our district's slow bandwidth speed to another colleague earlier this week.
Our school district has subscribed to Discovery Education Streaming, however, using it during the school day is rather hit or miss. Educators (including yours truly) have experienced a complete loss of connection while using it, or, the website would be blocked altogether for weeks at a time. (Yes, this occurred last school year.)
Education Week published a great article online a few days ago about this very topic. Here's a quick snippet:
Now that Internet access is pretty much standard in most schools, the next hurdle districts are facing is the speed and capacity of their connections. With the rise in popularity of YouTube and other video-streaming Web resources, many school districts are struggling to provide enough broadband to handle those bandwidth-heavy applications, and experts say the demand will only increase as new technologies are revealed.
http://www.edweek.org/dd/articles/2008/09/30/01broadband.h02.html
I agree wholeheartedly with the views shared in the article, however it leads me to ask the following question: With our economy in such financial turmoil, and knowing that the budgets of school districts across the nation are affected by the lack of revenue that this economic turndown has brought with it, how will school districts fund an upgrading of technological infrastructure? Is this doomed to fall to a lower level on schools' priority list?
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3 comments:
Our district is also experiencing this issue and concern with adequate bandwidth to support internet use and educational programs such as Discovery Education. We encouage teachers using the video streaming to download their videoes to the computer desktop for viewing. It certainly is a concern when teachers do not have the capabilities to access or easily use Internet Resources.
I do personally believe that the main issues with technology facing us as educators is our limited downloading capabilities more than our broadband access. I do work in a somewhat rural area and have been affected in the past by slow internet speed. I am fortunate enough to have my own laptop and thus download videos as needed at home prior to going to schools. I would love for their to be a way for teachers to have downloading capabilities at their fingertips in schools from many sites.
I understand the risks of doing so involves the fact that students may have access to sites they shouldn't but there are ways to avoid this that really are not looked at too often.
I Love the streaming sites provided by the school systems but I also feel there is so much available that we are unable to use including very educational videos via YouTube. I understand that this should be more about broadband capabilities, but I personally believe the issue is far deeper and underlying, especially for me where my students really have minimal internet access at school anyways.
The article brought up some good points. The high school where my father teaches has somewhat of a hit and miss connection with the internet. I use Verizon wireless for my laptop and my connection speed is much faster than the high school. Schools should have the best connection money can buy.
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