More MAP today. Very frustrating as the infrastructure seems to have been rolled out without any performance/scalability testing. Five and six year olds are generally not blessed with a lot of patience and when they are removed from their routine, their classroom, and made to sit in front of unfamiliar equipment which doesn’t work, they’re unhappy. And their teachers and other staff, less so.
Evidently, the purpose-built wireless networking equipment for the 25 or so laptops is insufficient. Response times are abysmal, with some of the units freezing to where some students had to be moved to a different station. Older wired equipment seemed to work fine, so the performance issues were not computational. Did no one roll out this system in a lab and test it? Have no other schools reported these issues? And how much taxpayer money is being spent on this? The loss of instructional time, especially given how early in the school year this comes, and the misuse of staff time as library specialists and teachers are forced to do technical support for this product is more of a waste. How hard would it be to send along the equipment to put this on a wired segment? Probably cheaper too. I think a wireless base station should support 25 clients easily, but again, was this ever tested? The old adage that “if you don’t monitor it, you aren’t managing it” rings true here, more simply expressed as “an unmonitored system isn’t in production.” Maybe too geeky for a discussion of education but it ties in with the notion of assessing performance and responding to what’s learned.
And this will be repeated in January and May. January is awfully soon anyway but consider: November is shortened by the Thanksgiving break, then we return for a 2-3 weeks before winter break, with some kids absent and many of them distracted by the upcoming holidays, then two weeks off for winter break. How much useful instructional time is in there? How much will these kids be expected to learn over that time? And will it all work any better?