Dive Brief:
- While the complications of the Federal Communication Commission's E-Rate application may scare some schools off, billions of dollars exist to help schools prepare for the technology demands of 21st century classrooms.
- Ed Tech Magazine reports the E-Rate Productivity Center is getting an upgrade and is expected to become more user friendly, but schools should be doing the hard work of planning ahead before even starting an application, including creating long-term vision, assessing current technology and laying out a five-year plan for using the funding.
- While it is tempting to jump to expanding broadband capacity, schools should make sure their networks can handle it and consider upgrading technology like routers and firewalls to improve functionality — and state E-Rate coordinators and other experts can be important resources in helping make good decisions.
Dive Insight:
It's virtually guaranteed that schools are going to need more bandwidth in the coming years. Teachers are getting more accustomed to using digital technology in their classrooms, and each new class of students has grown up with more of these devices than the last. While administrative departments are often siloed off, planning future tech needs should be an area in which leaders from IT and curriculum and instruction work together. A longterm plan is critical to ensure the right amount of bandwidth is necessary when new initiatives are implemented. Otherwise, user experiences are bound to suffer.
When schools approach 1:1 initiatives, the first step has to be network infrastructure. Before buying any new devices, schools have to prepare their networks to handle them. Conveniently, this provides a bit of lag time that teachers can spend learning about the new products and developing plans for incorporating them into their lessons in authentic ways.
