Not all WiFi is created equal

Stress test your WiFi before you find yourself in a stressful situation

Currently there is a territory wide roll out of WiFi in schools across Hong Kong. While this is a wonderful initiative and allows for much easier adoption of mobile devices in both primary and secondary schools, it needs to mentioned that the bandwidth that the schools receive is unclear. It is possible that the person responsible for procuring a broadband connection for the school and a WiFi system for the school is not very tech savvy. It is also possible that price point was the main concern when subscribing to a service and purchasing hardware. In that case it falls to the class teacher to test out and see what is actually possible in the classroom.

Quick and dirty glossary of terms

* These terms are simplified for non-tech based people, if you need absolute accuracy, please google these terms.

Bandwidth - the amount of information that can be passed through the network over time. usually measured in megabits (e.g. 1m = 1 million bits per second)

Ping - how responsive a network is. measured in milliseconds, lower ping = more responsive.

Download Speed - the amount of information that can be pushed from outside your network to a device on your network over time, e.g. watching a video on youtube on a computer. Usually measured in megabits

Upload Speed - the amount of information that can be pushed from your network to a system outside of your network, e.g. sending an email with an attachment. Usually measured in megabits.

Simple network: from a flood to a trickle

The best way to think of your WiFi connection at school is to think of it as a garden hose. If you open your hose all the way you only get so much water per minute. Its quite constant and you can get more out of a hose when it is completely open. Now think of splitting the hose between two people. You still have the same amount of water but now it's going to two different places at half the amount (if both people are using it) Now instead of just two people, imagine that hose is shared between 28 students and 1 teacher in the class. That hose that had only two people using it is pretty effective, but once you have a whole class using it, the amount of water that each person receives drops to a trickle. 

So what does this mean for me and my class?

The challenge is not knowing what the limitations of your network is before setting up your activities. Many "free" teaching resources that use cloud-based solutions require a lot of bandwidth to work smoothly. The more videos and images you pull down and push out the more robust your network and wider your bandwidth need to be to be effective tools in class. Would a video for each iPad work if it took 1 minute to play 5 seconds worth of video? If individual videos don't work, then maybe groups might be better or downloading the video and storing it on each device might be better.

These are things that you should be aware of before you spend a lot of time making arrangements and finding those resources for class.

So how can you test your network?

1. Use a web-based site or app to help you run a stress test on one device.

There are a lot of free sites out there that will help you gather information about your network. Some popular tests are:

• http://speedtest.net
• http://fast.com
• http://testmyspeed.com

These are good tests to see what your network is capable of. Most of these services offer apps both on the App Store and on Google Play. Search for these apps using the names above. You should also conduct this test on multiple devices, e.g. a wired computer vs. WiFi connected device.

You should also run this test simultaneously on multiple devices. Your network may try to limit each device so that it cannot take too much of the network's bandwidth. Test this with multiple devices at the same time until you see a drop in performance and see if it affects all the devices or just the devices that you start a bit later.

2. See how many devices you can connect to your school WiFi at a time in one room. 

Most schools are large and require multiple WiFi routers to provide service to the whole school. If the students are confined to one room, it may over tax that router. Test it to see how many devices can connect to one router using the test services listed above.

3. Test the coverage in your school.

There may be some spots or rooms that have weak or no WiFi coverage. Find these spots before you plan a lesson in a room with no or weak WiFi. You can check at a glance by looking at the WiFi signal bars on your device and also run the tests to see how the performance changes as the signal gets weaker.

Hopefully, by knowing the limitations of your network, you can design technology enhanced lessons that your students can access rather than having a lesson wasted on tech support.

Quill.org - edit to get it (grammar)

Quill.org is a wonderful service to help students of many ages develop grammar awareness. It does this from an "editing point of view" where the student is given a passage and they need to identify the errors in the passage. The software then identifies the changes that were made correctly, incorrectly or changes to the passage where there was no error. Based on the results of the student, the site then tailors a set of exercises for the student to practise. 
What I find particularly interesting with this service is that it makes the student type the complete sentence and not just the missing word. By doing this it reinforces good habits in editing, such as re-reading from the beginning of the sentence, following other previously learnt grammar conventions and also good typing practice for students that are developing in that area.

Quill.org is platform agnostic, but because of the typing requirement, it seems to work better on devices with keyboards. It also looks like it might be useful as a way for a whole class to engage with the programme as a shared writing activity. I have to play with the site a bit more, but I think it keeps drawing as many exercises as needed from a database, so having it on the projector you could model where you, the teacher, identify the problem the problem and do a think aloud as to how you would correct this sentence and finally make your correction. Feedback is instant and the site highlights what was done. Quill.org might also be a great activity to have at a station for students to work on independently or possibly for fast finishers. Let me know how you use it. 

Quill.org is a free site and looks like an interesting way to develop your editing skills regardless of how old you are.

For more information about Quill.org check out their YouTube channel on how to get started, 

Seesaw - digital portfolios

This week, we've been playing with Seesaw in the office. Seesaw is a very easy way for teachers, students and parents to view comment on and track learning.

What we love:

• easy for teachers to use in the classroom
• easy for students to use (shared devices can use QR codes to login)
• very simple workflow, but robust
• It stores evidence of student work in a Facebook like news-feed
• allows students to explain their work with virtual whiteboard features
• allows younger learners to leave oral comments on their own work
• allows the whole class to access others' work
• any post can be pushed to a class blog
• controlled and safe environment for students
• Let Seesaw store your students' work

Here are the features in action:

QR Code login

Creating a journal - there are even more features available now that are not in the video

How we will be using it:

The hardest part that we see in getting teachers to use ed tech in lessons is getting teachers familiar and comfortable using technology first. So what we're planning on doing is having teachers use Seesaw to create journals of their co-planning and make the material visible so that they will have an artifact for later that they can refer to and possibly use as a discussion point for reflection after planned lessons, and comments can be written in to support next year's lessons.