Sometime in the next six months, Longmont, the city where I teach, will be rolling out a city-wide wireless network. Some of my students have their own, WiFi equipped, laptop computers. Not many, but some.
Uh oh.
Can you imagine what’s about to happen? The storm that’s going to be coming? The only way to keep out unfiltered bandwidth would be to ban all devices that aren’t school network devices. I don’t see that being a viable solution at all — students bringing their own computers improves access for everyone.
The world is coming into our classrooms. It’s scary, disruptive, messy, engaging, beautiful, offensive, ugly, nice, mean, upset, upside down, and a whole lot else. Time for us to deal with it rather than try to hide behind a blanket.
Disruption, on a City Wide Scale
4 thoughts on “Disruption, on a City Wide Scale”
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Bud,
In the district where I work (Walled Lake in SE Michigan), we have hundreds of students bringing in laptops they own and we encourage them to do so. It is not without problems… but they supplement the laptops that are provided by the district at our schools. Yes, it is scary, but with proper planning and expectations, it is worth it!
I am working with the Cisco crew Thanksgiving week to install a wireless cloud over each of our campuses. This will be interesting. It will be fun, but it will be interesting. Needless to say, my room will have a strong wireless signal about it. 😉
At the conference you spoke of being irresponsible for hording our “good stuff” as teachers. Same goes for technology. Hording access to the world, the bus ticket to the global village, is irresponsible as teachers. We should be thrilled that they will have the access to technology while in our classrooms; we can teach them how to “ride” responsibly. Now, the key is how to navigate when admin. puts in various roadblocks. Why is it that instead of teaching kids about dangers in the world, we hide them from them?
Jessica, that’s a great question. I agree completely — but have found that many administrators and tech folks want to ensure the stability and security of their networks at all costs.
I’m excited for the new network, as it’s going to force us to ask some very serious questions about how access to technology provides opportunity for teaching, learning, and for discovering how big and wide and open the world is becoming.
We cannot close our schools off from the outside world.