Entire School an Internet Hotspot

[jrsjrs]

Our Educational Future Requires Full Internet Accessibility

Most of our high school students bring their laptops to school but are not able to
connect to the Net on the benches in front of the school on a warm day.
In the library, only about three laptops can connect at any one time.
Many students who do gain access to the Internet then lock up bandwidth
by downloading music, accessing chatrooms or viewing non-educational sites,
and blacklisting websites does not seem to work.

1) We need hardware/software to enable at least 300 laptops to be connected
to the Internet at the same time wirelessly anywhere on our school grounds.
2) We need whitelist hardware/software to block out all websites except
the 50,000 websites that have been preapproved by our staff as acceptable.

Does your school already have the above two features or
do you know a company that can provide them to our school?

[mopar]

That's really difficult. I know that my school is nowhere near that possibility. However, our server seems to help a little with sites viewed and having the students use a special log in with their ID. We have a couple of students who use laptops and we have gotten parent permission to but a general log in so that to access our server they must use their ID.

[EricDNA]

I suggest you check with some of the local colleges to see how they overcome these issues. A lot are wireless and have the most powerful servers. I hope this helps. Check with the college IT department.

[EricDNA]

And you are right, so many good sites for us and our students. The 21st century student is different. I just wish our school district would adopt the new ways to learning. Still the red brick house methods being used. Afraid to risk the change I guess.

[avaroe]

Hi there,

The high school I work at has a 1-1 laptop program where we use laptops instead of text books. We've overcome the problems with multiple users downloading everthing etc. And finally everything is working nicely! I will ask the IT Manager at school tomorrow what we use.