OTTAWA – According to David Miller, Manager of the Business and Learning Technologies Department of the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, the current generation of Canadian students brings an unprecedented familiarity with, and demand for collaborative online learning into school.
Over the past six years, in partnership with its current network service provider Atria Networks, the Ottawa-Carleton School Board has become a national leader in bringing the educational and administrative benefits of high-speed networking to students and teachers alike.
“Students want unfettered network access to everything and everyone, no filters, no restrictions,” says Miller. “We channel students to use appropriate tools and we listen to kids’ and teachers’ opinions. The goal is to provide a growing network that lets everyone go into class, log on and GO! Students want to work on a peer to peer basis, the same as it will be for them at university, college, and moving forward, the office.”
“New technology and collaboration are huge parts of students’ lives. In the old days we taught computer skills. Now, most kids know more about computers than we do. Kids are on Web 2.0 tools, if we incorporate what most kids already know about network use into the classroom, half of the work is done. Miller says “The hope is that when students leave secondary school they’ll have more than just tech skills, they will have ‘learned how to learn’, to cooperate, to create, and to adapt, to fit their abilities successfully into business, post secondary learning, and life skills.” Miller’s perspective comes from over 30 years experience with the School Board, including five as the head of his department. “We have a staff of 92 in the department and we love our work.”
According to Miller, the Business and Learning Technologies Department is responsible for data and electronic communications in the school board, this includes classroom computers, all networks and Internet services, business systems, telecommunications, and student record data. Miller’s team also provides technology integration consulting services to classroom teachers, and a host of support services for school and administrative staff.
The School Board’s drive to remain on the absolute leading edge of collaborative network technology in education dates to 2002. “At that time, Telecom Ottawa (acquired by Atria Networks in May 2008) came out with its program to hook up every school in the Ottawa area to high-speed network service,” Miller said.
The network service provider came to the table with a proposal offering ultra high-speed, Layer 2 switching, easy management and less complex, super-aggregated V-LAN support.
The price was very attractive, Bell’s quote to provide the same capacity and feature was set at a two to three times the cost per site, with slower speed. Says Miller, “Telecom Ottawa provided a very good price, and we went with them.”
“Once we signed up for the new service, Telecom Ottawa went ahead with the build. It took five months, start to finish, extraordinarily fast, and with superb reliability,” he said.
When Telecom Ottawa was acquired by Atria Networks, “I initially had concerns about the original contract, since it was such a bargain for us,” says Miller. “Atria Networks honored the terms of the existing contract as part of its acquisition. I was also worried about the excellent folks at Telecom Ottawa, whether they’d keep their jobs under Atria Networks’ management,” Miller says. “They’re all still there, except if they were promoted or are working elsewhere in Atria’s operations.”
The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board’s network lets all the schools in the system run pretty much any application they want down the fibre-optic network.
For Miller’s department, the Internet has just kept getting better and more useful. Web 2.0 technologies now provide centralized services to teachers, and the board benefits from videoconferencing.
Online learning, ‘off campus’ is now closer to reality. There’s a desire to support students from kindergarten to grade 12. All of this has become possible by the availability of economical high-speed networking.
The Board is saving money on costs of operations and equipment,
but the main benefit is an increase in functionality, for both learning and administration.
The Board’s bandwidth needs are increasing exponentially. The next thing is to build a wireless network. There’s never enough budget to instantly satisfy the growing demand. “We try to use students’ and teachers’ input to choose appropriate tools for the future. We’re glad to see kids adopting these tools, and coming out confident and well educated,” he said.
IT does not lead education, says Miller, but rather supports students, teachers and administrators. Academic achievement results across the Board are going up, and schools are retaining kids in class faster than they are losing them. “We’re not perfect,” admits Miller, “but the networking technology Atria has provided is playing a positive role.”