Duration: 1:31
Dominic Killalea, Deputy Principal at Wellington High School, discusses some key infrastructure considerations to ensure good connectivity across your school.
The key things that we had to take into account were, one, our connection to the outside world. If you’ve got a good connection in the first place, if you’re connected to N4L that’s good. Secondly, then our wireless. You’ve got to then make sure that you’ve got good wireless connectivity and you can make mistakes there. And there are lots of vendors that will tell you what their APs can do. However, do a trial, get that equipment into the school as well I’d recommend.
We got Ruckus equipment into our school. We were able to actually try out and see exactly how many connections we could make. Your physical environment’s incredibly important because we’ve got a main block which has a huge amount of concrete so we have to make sure that we can get our wireless around that and appropriately place [access points]. You have to do a lot of thinking around where you’re going to put those access points.
Thirdly, what we required in terms of a device from the students, the specifications that that device needed to meet. Fourthly, if they brought a device to school, how they would look after that at school. So in other words, making sure there was a plan for insurance if something went wrong. Making sure there was a plan if there was theft. Making sure there was a plan if the device was just dropped. That’s probably been the single biggest problem, students dropping devices.