Sunday, October 23, 2011

#EduScotICT What more to debate about Wifi in Schools ?

Just catching up with blogs and posts just  had a great week off with family around Scotland.


Surprised and rather disappointed that no-one picked up on first speakers real point about wi-fi
Even the TES Article "Give us Some Coffee Shop Technology " missed main point.

I tuned in and heard a very erudite Rhys McKenna state that even foreign campsites now have wifi.

Starbucks have had  free Wifi in UK since 2009.
The offices I left in 2002 had guest wifi available on request.
There is not a city centre I've been too in last few years without a wifi hotspot of some kind, nor usually a conference , you can sometimes even do it on a train.

If you just read this sort of coverage - you can  hear the nae sayers  being very understanding about schools struggling to compete with global corporates even if they are  - Coffee Chains.

But campsites now do wifi  ( our camp-site had it as well  last summer ) - even some Scottish ones do  - and lots of homes have wifi too - so for goodness sake why not schools. What more is there to talk about?  or should we set up temporary under canvas learning centres with wifi  ?






2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have lots of sympathy for the view expressed here, but there is a major networking problem to overcome and it isn't the in-building wi-fi.

Apparently (I'm told by people involved in paying for it) most Scottish schools have a truly dire Internet connection - often in the 4-10 Mbps range (that's plenty for a household, but not for a school) - because the cost of providing a better connection is prohibitive. Perhaps someone needs to ask questions about the pricing?

Joe Wilson said...

It is worth digging a bit deeper the network back bone to local authorities actually quite robust
and to date procured nationally http://networkedblogs.com/oMx1M
It will only get better.

Where there is decent bandwidth we need to make more of the asset was my point.

But there should be a lot more openess around how schools and local authorties provision links out to schools

I'd not normally post or respond to an anonymous comment