What little Hans doesn’t learn …
The COVID crisis and the first lockdown in spring 2020 clearly showed that digitalisation in the education sector was far from as advanced as it could have been. Parents who found themselves in the situation of having to teach their children at home can certainly tell you a thing or two about that. Teachers were also unprepared to provide teaching materials digitally and to hold lessons online. After all, children are known to find it much easier to deal with (new) technologies than adults—many of us have surely had to learn that lesson at some point.
Now that we are in the middle of the second lockdown, there should be no more excuses. Many decision-makers used the summer months to invest time and money in infrastructure. Although the federal and state governments have been promoting digitalisation in schools for years (we reported on this), only a few have taken advantage of it so far. Of course, it is not enough to simply provide WiFi. Internet access must be made age-appropriate and secure, and it must differ for students and teachers. Learning portals and other content must be accessible at all times, while streaming, gaming or other unwanted applications should be easy to block. And because experience shows that there are a great many devices on the network, the available bandwidth must be managed. For example, fixed bandwidth for certain classrooms may make sense, or dynamic settings if there should also be some capacity left for the schoolyard during break time or for parent-teacher conferences.
For precisely this purpose, we developed the IACBOX Classroom edition. It enables secure Internet access, offers various login options, comprehensive bandwidth settings, an overview of accessed applications, and is GDPR-compliant. School-specific ticket templates, web-based admin access and detailed instructions for teachers round off the package. Admittedly, we did not do this entirely without self-interest, because children’s education is also in our interest. Who knows—perhaps the next developer is connecting to the WiFi via IACBOX right now.
We asked around among our partners who have already installed an IACBOX Classroom edition . The colleagues at FREDERIX Hostpot GmbH equipped a secondary school in northern Germany over the summer and put the first Classroom edition into operation. 500 students and 55 teachers will be coming and going in the current school year; the children are between 10 and 15 years old. The WiFi and network infrastructure was built from scratch. This has the advantage that the cabling can be installed exactly as needed. The necessary electrical work was carried out during the summer holidays. The school now has a generous 600 Mbit/s symmetrical fibre connection (i.e. the same bandwidth for upload and download). This makes it possible to handle very large volumes of data. Three buildings and the schoolyard are covered with WiFi using Ruckus access points. Students log in with a password; teachers with a username and password. In the initial phase, the children use their own devices; later, tablets will be added. Login takes place daily, i.e. the class teacher enables Internet access before lessons begin and students can connect by scanning a QR code. At the end of the school day, access expires and the devices are logged out automatically. The different users are handled differently via ticket templates. Which applications and content need to be blocked or perhaps only logged with the help of the Application Control will only become clear over time. Based on evaluations, this can be monitored over a period of time and the necessary settings can then be made.
Stay tuned—towards the end of the winter semester, after hopefully a few months of in-person teaching, we will gather feedback again and report on how the Classroom edition has performed.
