WiMAX in Schools

I'm absolutely thrilled that our school was just awarded a no strings attached grant from the Association for Continued Education and Clearwire. This grant includes WiMAX broadband data access, professional development via the Discovery Education Network, and nine iPads (we had the option of selecting from a range of different hardware choices-we've chosen the iPads).

Here is what this means for us:

-Our school will receive a WiMAX modem for campus coverage (I think coverage might extend well beyond our campus using the WiMAX modem, but we'll find out more about this when we start using it). This means that standard wireless 802.11 b/g (not sure about "n") devices like laptops, iPads, etc, will be able to connect to this modem from anywhere on campus without the need for a hardware wireless WiMAX adapter. WiMAX offers true broadband data transfer, with speeds running between 3-7 Mbps and bursts up to 10 Mbps. We'll be able to use the modem and USB adapters free of charge for three years. Setting the WiMAX modem up is supposed to be super easy-they're sending it to our school pre-configured and ready to go out of the box. This system will not be replacing our traditional LAN and WiFi system; it is simply being used as a compliment to what we already have.

-We will also receive as many USB adapters as we'd like for access to the WiMAX network in most any peninsula communities running from San Jose all the way up to San Francisco. This may be useful to students who are traveling for sports, teachers who don't want to continue paying Comcast for Internet access (like myself), and any students/families who are in financial need. I'm interested to see how students and teachers use it to go out into the community to collect data and work on projects. Their network coverage will be fairly limited for starters, but we do know that it will work in the peninsula communities like Palo Alto, Menlo Park, etc.

-What will our iPads be used for? I really don't know, but I'm interested to see what kind of creative uses our kids devise. Perhaps some will form an iPad band with multiple different musical instruments and maybe we'll make some available through our school library to check out as eReaders...who knows.

-Discovery Educator Network professional development - I'm really excited about this. We'll be able to build a custom professional development experience for interested faculty along with a DEN facilitator (hopefully Hal Davidson, but who knows). I have no idea when we'll do this, but I could see it providing a great Fall 2010 follow up to our Summer Learning Institute.

We should be receiving our campus WiMAX modem at some point before the school year is out...I'll be sharing updates on how well this is working throughout this project.

I'm really interested in pervasive data access that isn't dependent on physical location-perhaps wide area broadband systems like WiMAX will be part of such a pervasive broadband wireless solution. I'm definitely looking forward to learning more about how this technology can help school learning communities achieve their goals.

A special thank you is in order to ACE and Clearwire for making this opportunity available to our school community!

Would you let your child(ren) spend as much time on the computer as you spend on it?

This was a twitterpoll sent out this morning by Brian Grenier, and my initial response was as follows:

Gr8 question-this is my point to teachers who want to block/limit student access during the school day

To which Brian replied,

I'm missing the point, can you elaborate?

To which I replied,

ahh, the limitations of 140 characters...I'll elaborate on my blog or some other public space and send to you

Twitter can definitely be a source of confusion when getting involved in back and forth discussions. Many times we lose the meaning in emails, which aren't bound by a 140 character restriction. So twitter can definitely be problemmatic in discussions.

I'll attempt to clarify my thinking (I can't promise that I'll do a very good job of it here either!!)

Brian's initial question in twitter, "Would you let your child(ren) spend as much time on the computer as you spend on it?" simply triggered something that I've been thinking for quite some time now.

Imagine if adults were forced to work with mostly analogue tools and limited access to digital tools during the work day much like students are required to do during their work day. Now imagine those adults going home and having better access to digital resources and connectivity to digital resources than they do during the work day (much like many of our students).

Why don't students have connectivity during the school day? Why should they mostly be limited to analogue tools with occasional computer lab access? Imagine if adults were forced to work with analogue tools all day with periodic access to digital resources in some centralized computer lab environment in their work place.

Anyway, this is somewhat tangential to Brian's original question, and my analogy might be somewhat flawed, but I believe students should have solid access to digital resources in the 21st century just like they had solid access to anaglogue resources in the 20th century.

Karl Fisch wrote a wonderful post on, "Why Wireless," which discusses the value of a publicly accessible WiFi node on his campus.

Over-and-out...