Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

Black Box Makes the IoT Building a Reality With Its Connected Buildings Solution

Black Box, a global solutions integrator, today introduced Connected Buildings — a suite of solutions and services that enable digital experiences in smart, IoT buildings. Black Box designs, deploys, manages and maintains the foundational technology that connects the internal ecosystem of interoperable devices and sensors that work together to enable human-to-human, human-to-device and device-to-device interaction. Black Box’s Connected Buildings services modernize IT infrastructure, solve in-building connectivity challenges and link clients’ devices at locations around the world.

“Demand for the IoT building is growing exponentially. Now more than ever, our customers need spaces that are interactive, adaptive, automated and secure,” said Doug Oathout, senior vice president, Portfolio and Partnerships, Black Box. “At Black Box, we apply our broad portfolio of IT solutions to take the complexity out of connected buildings and make it simple for our customers by giving them one trusted partner to handle their IT services. Whether updating hundreds of existing locations or outfitting one location from the ground up, our team of project managers, engineers and technicians works with our clients to craft a solution that creates consistent customer experiences and reliable communications at every location.”

The Black Box Connected Building is enabled by several faster, more robust technologies: 5G/CBRS and Wi-Fi to augment existing wireless systems and create fully connected buildings; edge networking and data centers to collect data where it’s created and combine it with AI to make smarter devices; and cybersecurity for governance and assessments, incident and event monitoring, endpoint detection and response, and VPN and firewall services.…Read More

10 priorities for K-12 IT leaders

School districts are moving to highly digital ecosystems, and K-12 IT leaders have more and more to manage to ensure that teaching and learning can go on uninterrupted by failing or clunky technology.

CoSN’s annual IT Leadership Survey offers critical insight into what’s expected of today’s K-12 IT leaders. The survey’s findings help to identify areas where IT leaders might need more support and assistance as they work tirelessly to meet the IT needs of administrators, teachers, and students.

Related content: How school IT leaders can avoid a cyberattack…Read More

5 steps to building a future-ready K-12 network

Any investment you make in your network infrastructure should be driven by the learning objectives you’ve set. Creating a plan for your network upgrade begins with understanding how your network will be used over the next 3–5 years to advance teaching, learning, and school administration.

Setting goals should be a community-wide process, with input from students, teachers, parents, and administrative staff. If you don’t already have a forward-looking strategic plan in place or if it needs to be updated, use surveys, focus groups and a strategic planning committee. Be sure to include representation from all stakeholder groups to set your vision and identify your goals.

Download this step-by-step guide to planning a network infrastructure to help you achieve your learning objectives.…Read More

3 amazing findings about digital and mobile learning

In order to support digital and mobile learning, students in K-12 classrooms need access to sufficient bandwidth, scalable and affordable broadband infrastructure, and robust Wi-Fi.

And for the most part, they have it.

Educators and school IT leaders have worked tirelessly toward this end, and according to the nonprofit EducationSuperHighway, 99 percent of school districts across the nation are now on scalable fiber connections with a “clear path” to supplying enough bandwidth for digital and mobile learning in every classroom.…Read More

7 strategies to navigate a tech upgrade

Several school district officials have told us they want to embrace our philosophy of empowering students and teachers through technology innovation, but lack the right infrastructure to support this vision. After our district completed a three-year, district-wide technology refresh cycle, we wanted to share our top takeaways to help our peers get more educational benefits from your network infrastructure.

Lesson #1: Organizational structure matters

Like many districts, in the past our IT department delivered products and services as a separate entity from our curriculum and instructional development staff. Now we’re all organized under the same leadership and our joint team is headed by a chief learning officer.…Read More

Tech directors: Here’s how to truly support multi-screen classrooms

Today, education is far more flexible and collaborative than a generation ago, and technology is key in enabling teachers to quickly adapt lesson plans to suit the moment’s activity. Having multiple screens that a teacher or student can wirelessly project to, along with the ability to switch between sources in seconds, means that teachers aren’t tied to the front of the classroom any more. They are free to roam around to small groups, to see what students are working on simultaneously, and to call attention to particularly high-quality work or ideas that challenge and stimulate.

But all that technology does students little good if it can’t function properly because your school’s IT infrastructure isn’t up to the job. At Central Coast Grammar School in Australia, when Director of Teaching and Learning Damon Cooper pushed for more flexible and collaborative classrooms, we knew we would have to redefine our infrastructure.

Prototyping a vision with spare parts
For more than a year, Cooper piloted his vision of multi-screen classrooms by piecing together whatever spare parts we had on hand. If I retired a screen from another part of the school or had a spare from a bulk purchase, he wanted it. Over that period, Cooper worked closely with me to prototype his vision. That work functioned as a proof of concept and fit nicely with our strategic plan, which called for an increased focus on digital literacy, greater collaboration, and developing students who can produce and publish digital work.…Read More

Building a smarter network

Given the data, networking, and security implications of upcoming technology trends, K-12 schools will require a variety of innovations to meet dramatically increased wireless and wired network performance demands without adding more stress on overworked IT staffers.

We recommend the following strategies:

1. Adopt smart infrastructure.
To keep IT overhead low while delivering the performance required to power Internet of things (IoT) devices, augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) applications and whatever comes next, invest in more intelligent networking infrastructure. At the wired networking layer, replace your outdated switching paradigm with a modern platform that supports the new IEEE 802.3bz standard for multi-gigabit Ethernet and is driven by an advanced software operating system.…Read More

Cost is still keeping districts from boosting broadband speeds

Cost remains the biggest hurdle for schools trying to increase broadband connectivity speeds for students, according to CoSN’s 2017 Annual Infrastructure Survey.

The majority of school districts–85 percent, to be exact–meet the Federal Communications Commission’s short-term goal for broadband connectivity of 100 Mbps per 1,000 students, according to the survey.

The survey collected feedback from 445 large, small, urban, and rural school district leaders nationwide and examines the current state of technology infrastructure in U.S. K-12 districts.…Read More

Incredible: Teachers are forming job-specific collaboration networks. Here’s why and how

A large percentage of public school districts across the U.S. are comprised of 15 or fewer schools; 46 percent of districts have fewer than 1,000 students and a third have fewer than two schools. While many of these smaller school districts face the same challenges as larger school systems, they often lack the infrastructure and supports of larger districts—especially in the form of peer collaboration.

Several research studies have pointed out that educators in these districts—many of which are located rural areas—often experience “professional isolation,” making it hard to gain traction with the greatest school-related influencers on student achievement: the recruitment, development, and retention of teachers, teacher leaders, and principals.

As research has clearly stated for decades, there is no greater school-related impact on student achievement than the teacher in the classroom. The second-greatest school-related impact on student achievement growth is principal effectiveness. Not surprisingly, the largest impact on teacher retention is administrative support and school culture, both of which are impacted directly by the principal.…Read More