The Need for Speed
The Promise of Digital Learning
The Internet holds the greatest promise to transform the K-12 education in the United States. Digital learning can improve outcomes for our students and is critical to preparing our children for success in the 21st century.
96% of teachers believe that integration of technology and learning is important, and 82% believe that greater use of technology would be helpful in connecting learning inside and outside the classroom. Digital learning prepares our students for success by:
By using tools compatible with their day-to-day digital experience, students are acquiring learning skills that will continue to be relevant throughout their lives and prepare them for success in our global digital community. Speed Matters to Students:
The Internet is ever growing, serving more content and delivering more data to users every day. Similarly, the needs for bandwidth speed keep growing. Every user knows the frustration of lagging downloads and garbled videos.
Students and teachers need high-speed connections to the Internet in order to take advantage of streaming video, interactive content, and instruction via video conferencing. Despite a wide array of content and tools available online for learning, students and teachers are stuck waiting for basic web applications to load. The main reason: slow school connection speeds. America's Unfulfilled Promise
Despite years of hard work and progress in order to connect every school to the Internet, our responsibility to America's students is still not fulfilled. 80% of K-12 schools are unable to deliver enough content to meet their current needs.
The typical public school has the same Internet access as the typical home – but with 100x more users. In an age where information can be accessed instantly for consideration, discussion, and learning, students and teachers are disappointed to find that they are not able to access content from the classroom setting. In the absence of other solutions, teachers and students are finding work-arounds. In numerous classrooms around the country, teachers are instructing students to use personal smartphones to look up material for assignments because the school Wi-Fi and LAN is too slow. Want to learn about why school networks can be slow? Learn more here. |
Our Students Deserve Better Internet
Every student and teacher deserves access to the high-quality content and tools that will prepare them to succeed. At EducationSuperHighway, our mission is to ensure that every school has learning-ready Internet infrastructure to power K-12 student achievement and readiness for the future.
We recommend, along with the State Educational Technology Directors Association, that every school should have at least 100 Kbps per student and staff member by the end of 2013 (100 Mbps+ per 1,000 students and staff), growing to 1,000 Kbps per student and staff member by 2017. In order to meet this goal, schools need access to high bandwidth fiber-optic Internet connections and robust internal networks. EducationSuperHighway is helping K-12 schools acquire learning-ready Internet by gathering information about where struggling schools are, identifying specific needs, providing technical support, reducing costs for an upgrade, and providing policy support. Why Districts Need Learning-Ready Internet
In addition to leveraging online learning to improve outcomes for our students, learning-ready Internet infrastructure is also critical to accomplishing today’s major education policy initiatives and goals:
|
