In a digital age: SD#23 paving the way for how schools access the Internet

In a digital age

SD#23 paving the way for how schools access the Internet

By Shayna Wiwierski

Based on a recent statistic, it’s estimated that the overall number of mobile phone users will reach 4.77 billion in 20171. Google also reported a couple years ago that 87 per cent of people always have their smartphone at their side, day and night.

It’s a no-brainer that we live in a technologically filled world, and since anything and everything is readily available on our smartphones, computers, and tablets, the education system is a hub for these devices. Since WiFi is incredibly important to being connected, there’s one school district in B.C. that is paving the way for keeping their staff, students, and guests on a digital network.

The Central Okanagan School District (SD#23) offers an assortment of different WiFi networks to their 47 different sites, 44 of which are schools. Depending on who is accessing the Internet, whether it’s a student, teacher, or guest, their firewall will provide different qualities of services to the user. Meaning, that if a teacher is on one of the networks, they will get a higher bandwidth (faster Internet, perfect for streaming), versus a student or a guest. Depending on the machine type, whether it’s a district-owned device or their own personal one, each user must log on with district credentials so SD#23 can recognize who they are and allot the amount of bandwidth accordingly.

“If it’s a student with their personal device, our network will recognize that and give them a different quality of service. Same with teachers,” says Dave Swystun, learning technology department manager for SD#23, who adds that personal devices get a lower quality of service. “We give priority to the district-owned devices. Now they can log onto multiple different WiFis based on the device you’re using, and depending on who you are, you will get a different quality of service.”

Since there are over 14,000 devices that access their networks, SD#23 offers different networks to avoid congestion. They also have a dedicated guest access one if a vendor comes in and wants access to the

Internet. The guest would visit the office of the school or site and the secretary or administrator would visit a page created specifically for generating guest user IDs, which are accessible for a week.

Having these different networks is a big feat for the school district as it allows them to see who is accessing them. Since there is an authentication process, that allows a digital log of who is using the Internet and what they are doing on it.

The upgrade to the current network was a few years in the making. The province announced the Next Generation Network (NGN) upgrade in 2014, which is a partnership with school districts, the Ministry of Education, Telus, and IBM, which are the primary service providers. NGN replaced the Provincial Learning Network, which had been in use for 17 years and was not built to meet the demands of modern applications and the proliferation of mobile devices. The NGN provides modern infrastructure that services all public schools in the province and keeps pace with the evolving use of Internet by students and educators. In addition, it also provides firewall management, web/URL filtering, and Intrusion Detection Systems and Intrusion Prevention Systems.

“We were one of the first pilot school districts to [upgrade to the system]. As a school district, we were suffering from terrible bandwidth issues. The original PLN network was an outdated system and there was no way of upgrading the bandwidth,” says Swystun, who did research on what the NGN network could look like and came up with ideas that he brought forth to the provincial level. “We got some vendors like IBM that were trying to do some research into how we could improve it and my findings were brought in. We worked with IBM and the province to come up with a network that was more sustainable for the district to upgrade the bandwidth and provide a more scalable Internet service to school districts.”

Swystun says that once they upgraded, which was two years ago, their prior bandwidth problems went away. They also had more control over the networks and bandwidth, and could scale the amount to each schools’ needs. The WiFi is also transferrable to each school on a personal device, meaning that once someone logs in for the day, the WiFi will remember them if they leave one school and go to another in the district. Although every public school in the province was expected to upgrade to NGN by March 2017, Swystun says that a lot of districts have the capability to run the same system as SD#23 but don’t know how. He adds that their network is pretty technical and a lot of times the schools don’t have the staff to create a similar network. A lot of districts don’t use the same technology as them, especially when it comes to a guest network, which a lot of them don’t have.

“Our guest network is kinda unique and built up more than other districts that I’m aware of. Different people come back that have been out to different districts and they say we are miles ahead of where other districts are. What we have here is pretty unique.” n

Footnote

1 https://deviceatlas.com/blog/16-mobilemarket-statistics-you-should-know-2016