Rolling out Apple in Education
Things that make you go hmmm...
Deployment models
Institution-owned one-to-one: The institution purchases and supplies devices to individual students for use.
Shared use: The institution purchases devices but they are not supplied to individual students. They are shared amongst the population of the school as sets.
Student owned: This is a "bring your own device" model where students are responsible for supplying their device.
A discussion showed that most districts did not participate in the student owned model of deployment for obvious reasons. Some kids simply do not have access to their own devices and those who did had such a variety that management would be challenging. There would be no consistency.
About half of the attendees used the shared use method. These districts made sets of devices that were either housed as class sets, grade level sets, or library sets that were checked out to multiple patrons. One of the largest complaints from districts using this model was the lack of personalization available for the end user since it was not directly assigned to a specific student. Also, since students were not paired with a specific device, they were unable to utilize the devices at home. Their access was strictly limited.
The other half of attendees used the institution-owned one-to-one deployment model. This is the model we follow in our district as well. The advantage to this model is that we have a high amount of personalization for our students. They also have 24/7 access to their devices, and in turn 24/7 access to learning. The downside is the management of devices, which is time consuming. The initial setup of accounts and pairing them with specific students is extensive. The ongoing management is also challenging when the user has the ability to manipulate their Apple accounts.
Network / Wi-Fi
Access point location: The access points must be placed with care. Some obstructions can affect the access point from working properly. The more obstructions there are inbetween the transmitter and the receiver, the more likely that the signal strength will be affected. We also discussed staggering the channel numbers access points used to maximize performance. Channels must be assigned in such a way that they will not interfere with eachother.
Coverage: We discussed designing your network access points for full coverage. Each access point should overlap the neighboring access point coverage area by about 20%. The coverage of an access point does not end up being a perfect circle with the access point being the middle. The coverage is affected by obstructions, such as walls. The goal is to put the access points in a way that covers the entire school.
Capacity: Although the network coverage may blanket the whole school, that does not mean that everyone will be able to connect via Wi-Fi within the coverage area at once. There is a limited capacity that each access point can accomodate at one time. Once all of the available slots are filled on a particular access point, any device wanting to connect will start to "roam" to another access point. It would likely try Connect to a neighboring access point in the next room where that 20% overlap Is. When accessing the neighboring access point, a device may have a lower signal strength and slower response time. This is why you can have a class of students with some of them connecting and surfing just fine while others either cannot connect at all or they can connect but their service is either slow or intermittent.
Cheryl Bailey, Librarian
Email: Cbailey@estigers.k12.mo.us
Website: Essd40.com
Phone: 816-630-9260
Twitter: @Cheryl_Bailey10