Wireless Tools

  • Most schools probably have a wireless network already, or in fact two wireless networks.  It is common for schools to have a network for school administrators, and a separate network for students and their learning resources.
  • Leave the wireless stuff to your school technician.  Apart from being a major security risk, its easy to stuff up a wireless setup through well meaning actions. 
  • Before you run out and buy 200 hand held computers to use your wireless network, pay out for a good audit of your wireless network and how many devices it can support.  When wireless was first set up, there should have been a floor plan with the WAPs (wireless access points) drawn in.  The WAPs are then turned up or down to make sure each sits inside its own circle of coverage, with the circles overlap slightly.  Changing any of the wireless protocols or access points can upset the balanced setup, create new holes in coverage, or put too much load onto one point, making the system slow for everyone.
  • Each WAP (wireless access point) will have about 54 mps of data it can give out per second.  If there are five laptops in the room, each one will get about 10 mps of data, which should be OK.  If you instead have 25 devices, each one will then get 1/25th of the available data – about 2 mps.  Which will be far too slow for students to use.  One answer will be to add more wireless points to increase the data per device ratio.  Or the teacher could set up a more flexible curriculum so not all students will need to access the wireless network at once.  Or better still, make some informal rules in the classroom that wireless will only be used for low-traffic applications, such as loading and saving small files, and more intense traffic applications such as moving around large files and accessing media-enhanced web sites will use hard wired network connections.
  • I have included some easy wireless tools that amateurs can use to check how strong the wireless signal is in a particular area.  This is great for teachers and students who don’t know why their connections don’t work  and want to do first stage testing themselves.

 

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