Guest Post by Steven M. Baule, Superintendent, North Boone CUSD 200, IL.
I recently had the opportunity to attend a CISCO presentation for health care and education about BYOD and 1:1 and its merger with Meraki’s cloud-managed solutions. I won’t bother with the specifics, the links are there for that type of information, however the general tone and flavor of “pervasive computing” or “pervasive networking” is something to think about. The engineer who spoke has been involved in 1:1 education initiatives since 1999. He spoke about designing new college networks for 8:1 instead of 1:1, which is an interesting model to consider for K-12. If your school goes 1:1, do you think secondary students will leave their personal smart phones, iPads and laptops at home simply because we provide them with a tablet? I doubt it. So, although the goal of providing a device for every student is good, our efforts might be better spent focusing on the need for more robust networks, as well as the new CCSS testing (some examples from Indiana and Minnesota & Oklahoma). With the expansion of BYOD programs, school networks will soon need to manage far more than one device for every student. Is your network ready?
