The best part is that you don’t need a supercomputer to use them.

BusBoss Professional

Link to main story: Schools pursue better directions

Edulog Routing and Planning

First Student

Goal Systems GoalBus

Seon Max Compass

Transpar

Transfinder Route Finder Pro

Brian Nadel is a freelance writer in Pelham, New York.

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This not only requires having trained staff to fix problems, but maintaining careful coordination and communication between the technicians at schools and IT leaders at central headquarters.

“It’s best to have trained techs near where the trouble arises, but too many IT techs in the field gets expensive and inefficient because of their inevitable downtime between calls at a single school” says Nick Polyak, superintendent at Leyden 212 High School District in the Chicago suburbs.

“On the other hand, having too many people at the central help desk risks having an organization that is unresponsive and out of touch with the needs of its schools, students and teachers.”

And without the right fix���whether it’s a forgotten password, cracked tablet screen or an errant operating system���the school’s digital infrastructure and teaching can grind to a halt.

“Each one is the most important task from the perspective of the user in trouble” says Andrew Stenehjem, manager of user services at Oregon’s Beaverton School District. “If we can’t fix it quickly on the first try, we’ve failed.”

Windshield time

Los Angeles USD operates a central help desk but 90 percent of its 210 techs work in the field providing support to individual schools or moving among a few nearby buildings. The techs have a lot of autonomy in scheduling their days in order to react quickly to the demands of teachers and students.

They do get overall marching orders from central headquarters and have periodic training sessions to make sure everyone is on the same page. “They can get the lay of the land and anticipate users’ needs” says Themy Sparangis, LAUSD’s senior director of information technology and IT customer services.

For instance, just about every school experiences a web overload during lunch when students (and teachers) check social media or watch videos.

Balance between techs on site and those at headquarters is therefore key, Sparangis says. “We want to make sure that everything is working at the schools, but still have some people on call for the entire district.”

Other IT teams within LAUSD focus on networks and servers or handle software and E-Rate payments. All IT techs interact frequently on social media, regardless of whether they’re in San Fernando in the north or San Pedro in the south. Among other things, they share what the most prevalent problems are, and discuss fixes.

“We use an all-of-the-above approach to communications” including phone calls, software ticketing and social media, to make sure that every problem is solved, Sparangis adds.

For a district covering nearly 720 square miles, this decentralized approach to support pays off. Due to LA’s notorious traffic, it can take a couple of hours to drive from one end of the vast district to the other. Having techs close to the action at the schools cuts the wait.

“Windshield time is our greatest enemy” Sparangis says. “It means they’re driving or stuck in traffic rather than fixing the problem.”

Emergencies can bring out the best in IT support organizations. “The recent fires in our areas forced school closures and evacuations” Sparangis says. “We rerouted technicians from the normal duties of visiting schools to the affected sites to assure that technology was supported and maintained.”

Oregon IT trail

By contrast, windshield time isn’t as big a concern at Beaverton School District. With 53 schools spread over 57 square miles west of Portland, middle and high schools get a full-time support techician, while elementary schools share a person.

“For us, the split is about three-quarters at our schools and one-quarter at our central help desk” says Stenehjem, the manager of user services. “We dedicate 34 people to specific schools so they know what the users want, but still have enough people ready at our headquarters.”

School-based techs are free to schedule their day to streamline operations. They meet monthly to go over contingency planning, coordination and general trends, and to train for specific events. And with eight technicians held in reserve at HQ, the district can react quickly to districtwide problems without pulling people from the field.

Communication is key to coordinating IT activities, Stenehjem says. “It requires constant vigilance to make sure that people are getting the information they need when they need it.”

Beaverton uses Yammer, a Microsoft collaboration program that integrates support and analytics. It’s available on everything from a Mac and PC to tablets and iPhones. It lets IT staff check in on what problems need to be fixed and who’s going to do it.

In the event of a widespread IT emergency, such as a network failure, “we try to centrally communicate with the in-school techs via Yammer or School Messenger (text messages) to let them know that there’s an outage” Stenehjem says.

“We also try to include secretaries and some other school staff in these messages so that they can all help to proactively communicate with their school.”

The biggest danger is failing to respond to support requests. LAUSD and Beaverton roll overflow calls to outside contractors. “The calls never go unanswered” says Sparangis.

Teen power

At Leyden 212, Polyak takes a different approach. His district’s two high schools in suburban Chicago use student interns to perform 90 percent of IT support. It’s based on the district’s Tech Support Internship class that’s offered every period in both high schools.

The internship class has a teacher who is nominally in charge of the IT response network. Each period, seven or eight students perform repairs, answer tech questions and follow up on support calls.

As the first line of IT defense, they get training that they wouldn’t normally be exposed to until they were older.

About 70 to 80 of the district’s 3,300 students serve as tech interns, which means there’s a pretty good chance that one is in or near every classroom to respond to calls for help.

The district needs only eight adult technicians to deal with the more intricate and sensitive aspects of the IT infrastructure.

Teacher laptops that might contain confidential material, changing network passwords and all aspects of the school’s digital security are off-limits to students. “We get qualified support where it’s needed most���at the schools���and the students get valuable experience that will stay with them for life” Polyak says.

Leyden 212 uses a ticketing system that tracks each case’s progress and allows a problem to be passed to another tech intern if a student���as happens every 48 minutes ���has to go to their next class. “The hand-off is critical” Polyak says. “No problem should ever be ignored or fall into the cracks.”

Brian Nadel is a freelance writer in Pelham, New York.

The post K12 IT: Here, there, everywhere appeared first on District 91心頭istration.

The best way to keep a school’s computers free of malware while securing student and teacher identities is to use a layered approach powered by artificial intelligence in the cloud.

Just about every antivirus program has three overlapping defenses:

Link to main story: AI accelerates in K12

local scanning for known bad code

monitoring for behavioral changes that might indicate an infection is underway

sending anything suspect to a cloud server for analysis.

With AI, the latest machine-learning techniques tear suspect code apart to determine if it is dangerous or a red herring.

If it can do damage, a fix is automatically determined and quickly distributed to every computer at school���all without anyone even noticing.

Over time, the AI systems learn more and more about how viruses and ransomware work to get better and quicker at spotting dangers.

Brian Nadel is a freelance writer in Pelham, New York.

The post Security: The malware-cloud connection appeared first on District 91心頭istration.

From notebooks unable to run the most popular software to communication failures between learning management systems and key learning programs, incompatibility can result in a mess where expensive technology designed to revolutionize instruction refuses to function with other digital tools.

Lately, some breakthroughs have been made: Low-cost Chromebooks will have new access to popular apps; advancements in single sign-on technology makes remembering multiple passwords a thing of the past; and learning management systems (LMS) can now���unlike in years past���accept a variety of data sources and perform key tasks automatically.

The result: Schools have fewer isolated silos of data, and the information���from grades to attendance to finance���becomes more actionable for educators.

App capacity

Chromebooks have taken schools by storm���the platform garnered 58 percent of sales to K12 schools in 2016, according to a recent FutureSource market analysis. It’s been growing every year, up from 50 percent in 2015 and 38 percent in 2014. But Chromebooks have also been a case study in incompatibility: They’re Android-based and Google-centric.

But the latest batch of Chromebooks will run Microsoft’s Android apps. This upgrade is still under development and works only on some existing models, but soon all new Chromebook systems will run Android apps.

For Jim Monti, director of education reform, compliance and IT at Rhode Island’s West Warwick Public Schools, this means access to previously unavailable programs���everything from early learning games to Microsoft’s Office trio of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. “The new software is a big change that makes Chromebooks a compelling choice versus PC or Mac notebooks” he says.

Of the district’s 4,500 Chromebooks, only 15 use Android apps. That will grow as the district starts using 605 recently purchased inexpensive Chromebook touch-screen systems for a kindergarten rollout. And a 1-to-1 deployment is in the works for every student, teacher and administrator in the West Warwick school district.

“This has been a big deal for us because we can now afford computers for our students without taking money from somewhere else” Monti says. “The expanded software will let us use these systems to their fullest.”

Eye on the market

LMSs, used mostly in larger districts, are in 58 percent of K12 schools across the nation, according to FutureSource’s market analysis. Analysts forecast the rapidly expanding K12 market to grow from

$197 million

to

$285 million

in 2020���a cumulative annual growth rate of about 10 percent.

Passwords of the past

“Single sign-on”���another evolving advancement in compatibility���allows teachers and students to log into all of the programs and apps they use during the school day without having to remember or enter dozens of passwords.

In the School District of Lee County in Florida, teachers and students simply have to click a launch icon on their laptops to open their learning programs, says Rob Stratton, the coordinator for instructional materials, media and instructional technology.

This ease of access, made possible by a program called ClassLink, has been a huge time-saver���particularly when teachers are learning new programs, Stratton says.

“Our teachers have lived the nightmare” Stratton says. “That first 15 to 20 minutes of every training is about how do I get into the program, what’s my account? Now, with the just click of a button, they can get right to the heart of what the app does.”

An open standard called “One Roster” a component of single sign-on, automates the process of setting up accounts for many educational programs. In the past, that tedious task had to be done manually by IT staff.

Another big benefit of single sign-on and One Roster is that concerns over keeping track of dozens of usernames and passwords won’t prevent districts from adding new learning programs. That flexibility inspired Lee County to introduce several new reading programs after administrators there decided literacy scores needed to improve, Stratton adds.

Common cartridge

An LMS should serve as a school’s or district’s central nervous system, collecting data from every class, office and employee. It’s how a modern school builds a robust digital learning environment and automates thousands of essential tasks each day.

But incompatibility issues between an LMS and a spectrum of software can jumble data or send information to the wrong place on the school’s servers. A concept called “Common Cartridge” has been designed to make this data mismatch a thing of the past.

At its essence, Common Cartridge allows an LMS to communicate more easily and accurately, but requires heavy-duty programming. The IMS Global Learning Consortium���an organization spanning K12, higher education and the edtech industry���supplies the specs, tools and code libraries that LMS developers need to write the compatibility software.

Common Cartridge is designed to route all data to the right place. After a schoolwide fourth-grade assessment, for instance, the LMS could compile and score the answers and then send the results to the system’s gradebook. It can also send the results to each school’s principal with lists of those well under or above the mean for potential remediation and enrichment.

It can even forward the entire results to the state education commissioner’s office. In other words, all the district’s heavy data lifting is done by the Common Cartridge software.

‘It’s all automatic’

For years, Orland Park 230 Consolidated District near Chicago used an LMS to create a virtual classroom, but stored data in a separate student information system. The two often spoke different languages, leading to a lot of manual work. For instance, John Connolly, the chief technology officer, started each year by creating files for each class.

“It took a lot of time, but with Common Cartridge, it’s all automatic now” he says.

The move to a universal LMS world has one more advantage for districts: data portability. The Common Cartridge is “our exit plan, because at any time it allows us to move all our data to a new system without the hassles of converting the data” Connolly says.

One of the biggest LMS deployments is taking place at Los Angeles USD, the second largest district in the U.S. Because the data is hosted online and the content is delivered in a Web browser, the system isn’t restricted to PCs, Macs or iPads. It’s compatible with just about any connected computer, from a desktop in a lab to a notebook, phone or tablet, says Diane Pappas, the district’s CEO of project management.

“There’s no worrying about having the right version or a PC powerful enough” Pappas says. “And it has less of an impact on the district’s infrastructure.”

And Houston ISD’s move to a single, Common Cartridge-fueled LMS for its 284 schools has integrated a dozen digital content providers so successfully that 90 percent of the district’s high school classes no longer use printed textbooks, says Lenny Schad, the district’s chief technology information officer. “When an LMS works” says Schad, “it’s like magic.”

Brian Nadel is an education technology writer based in New York.

The post IT managers can eliminate edtech challenges appeared first on District 91心頭istration.

They worried the district’s 300Mbps connection would slow down or crash, making the new computers about as pedagogically useful as paperweights.

The story has a happy ending: The district inexpensively upped its online access allotment to 1Gbps by taking advantage of reduced prices offered by a local provider. “Now everyone has as much bandwidth as they need” says Kyle Bisignani, the district’s lead technologist.

Educators and students, of course, increasingly rely on the internet for everything from online curriculum and research to playing edu-games and posting grades. With teachers and administrators focused on the hardware and software, the online connection���one of the most important components of a school’s digital infrastructure���is sometimes neglected.

But with bandwidth getting cheaper and faster���and the availability of substantial federal E-rate assistance���there’s little reason for a school or district to exceed their data capacity. The drop in cost has motivated administrators to beef up their networks to handle the future demands that will come with the ever-growing power of technology.

More megabits

Adding capacity may cost only a little more���and sometimes less. The typical school in 2015 had access to 449 Mbps of bandwidth that cost an average of $4,527 per month.

By 2016, 42 percent of schools upgraded their connection speed to an average of 1.34 Gbps, at $4,862 per month, according to the report “2016 State of the States” by the San Francisco-based EducationSuperHighway, a nonprofit that seeks to make sure every classroom has sufficient bandwidth.

In other words, the average cost of buying a megabit per second of data access went down from $10 to $3.60 per month.

In early 2014, Colorado’s St. Vrain Valley School District’s chief technology officer, Joe McBreen, took advantage of these bargain-basement data prices. The district’s 1 Gbps line was just about maxed out and its schools needed more capacity.

At any particular time, the St. Vrain Valley’s 52 facilities had 40,000 systems connected to its data access line through its WiFi network. To boost the district’s data connection, he went to the local municipal electricity company, Longmont Power & Communications, and obtained an optical-fiber 10 Gbps line.

The surprise was that the cost went down from $370,000 to $270,000 a year, and E-rate money covers half its annual cost.

“We increased our bandwidth by 10 times and had a huge cost savings without any construction costs” says McBreen. The district now plans to add six iPad Minis to each middle school classroom. “We’re now as future-proof as we can be” he adds.

Hopatcong Borough Schools purchased its online access through a co-op, the Educational Services Commission of New Jersey. It had to spend only an extra $100 a month to more than triple its bandwidth from 300 Mbps to 1 Gbps.

There were no construction costs and the district now pays $3,400 a month, half of which is covered by E-rate payments.

The district’s 1 Gbps data limit provides plenty of leeway. “We typically use about 300 Mbps out of a 1 Gbps limit at any time” Bisignani says. “The most popular use is online curriculum, but the school’s thirst for data will only grow in the future.”

The data’s in the details

Think of a school’s data like water flowing through a pipe, with each online user siphoning off some of the pressure. Without a wide pipe and adequate supply, the data well will run dry���and there’s no bandwidth left for additional instruction, research or administrative tasks.

“It’s the equivalent of electricity in schools today���not having access to adequate data is the same as a teacher walking into a classroom and the lights not turning on” says Christine Fox, deputy executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SET91心頭) and one of the authors of the report “The Broadband Imperative II: Equitable Access for Learning.”

A child completing an online multiple-choice test could take up a few kilobits per second of throughput, while online research might require 1 Mbps.

Data-heavy activities like streaming video, distance learning or a videoconference with a parent or state official can take between 4 and 25 Mbps depending on the resolution of the stream (see data chart below).

How much data is enough? The Federal Communication Commission’s minimum access speed threshold of 100 Kbps per student is clearly a relic of the past. That might cover only email and some rudimentary web work.

“It’s really the starting point for school broadband” Fox says.

While there are thousands of shades of gray between, three basic levels of school data use exist:

Minimal needs. Email and other low-impact online activities are the norm and require 100 Kbps per user.

Basic multimedia. Some multimedia curriculum, requiring 1 Mbps per user.

High bandwidth. Here, students and teachers use multimedia, online curriculum and videoconferences for a total of 5 to 20 Mbps per user.

It adds up quickly. For instance, a school with 300 students and 20 staff members in the middle bandwidth category might need about 200 Mbps if half to two-thirds of the potential users are online simultaneously.

But if the district has 10 such schools, then 2 Gbps is necessary.

The key to future-proofing the school’s data connection is having extra capacity for new students and high-impact uses. “Keep 50 percent in reserve for peak demand or a new app” Fox says.

This level can also provide an effective buffer for activities like lunchtime YouTube viewing in the cafeteria, which can overwhelm an unprepared network.

Digital divide narrowing?

Cost concerns are greatly reduced if your school is in one of the 10 locations currently serviced by Google Fiber.

That’s because the company provides free 1 Gbps online connections to schools, libraries and community centers in Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Kansas City (Kansas and Missouri), Nashville, Provo, Raleigh-Durham, Salt Lake City, and Orange County, California. (View Google Fiber’s expansion plans.)

“It’s a big change for schools” says Rachel Merlo, community impact manager for Google Fiber in Kansas City. “Free online access can be a real eye-opener.” On the downside, the service is limited to 1 Gbps, but that should be plenty for a school with 200 to 300 students.

Aside from Google Fiber, the digital divide between educational haves and have-nots is narrowing, mostly because of the drop in costs, says SEDTA’s Fox. “The need has never been greater because every career will have an online component and students will need to prepare” she says.

Also good news is that the FCC provides nearly $4 billion of E-rate money to subsidize equipment and bandwidth costs. But, in recent years, districts requested three times as much money as is available, so it’s important to get E-rate applications in early during each funding cycle. (The next deadline should be early 2018.)

Brian Nadel is a freelance writer in Pelham, New York.

The post Schools bulk up their internet speed appeared first on District 91心頭istration.

Next-generation 5G mobile-phone communications capable of moving as much as 1 Gbps directly to a device could make obsolete the school’s optical data line, server rooms, miles of network cabling and Wi-Fi access points.

Essentially, every device���from a third-grader’s tablet and teacher’s notebook to central office desktops���would have a direct link to the public mobile phone data network, the way your mobile phones do today. It would potentially be faster than all but what a handful of schools have now.

But it might only be an option���at least at first���in Dallas, Denver, Miami and Washington, D.C., and several other urban areas where Verizon will debut the technology. (View the complete list.)

Plus, school administrators would have to get comfortable with giving up some control by relying on vendors to deliver, secure and store data.

The big stumbling block is economics. Rather than maintaining an internal network, a district would pay on a per-machine basis for its data and might be subject to data limits.

The post Will 5G solve internet speed problems? appeared first on District 91心頭istration.

The key is that everything from the web address to the actual data is encoded with the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cypher. To potential snoopers, it looks like random gibberish, but to the sender and receiver, it is student grades, class lists and attendance records.

AES has so many potential passwords that a supercomputer trying thousands of potential matches a second would need billions of years before a hacker could read the data.

Setting up a VPN requires a specialized server that handles the process. It’s usually based in a school or district’s server room and can be freestanding or a rack-mounted device.

The post Schools get technical appeared first on District 91心頭istration.

Schools thrive on free and open exchanges of information, but as soon as a principal reviews attendance records or examines student grades held on a district server, that openness must end. That’s because the internet was designed for a simpler era and lacks the security needed to protect a school’s ever-increasing cache of sensitive information.

Protecting all the data districts hold relies on secure communications between schools, as well as with parents and third parties such as psychologists, online curriculum providers and public safety officials.

In fact, it’s the law: treats everything from class lists to transcripts to disciplinary files as protected material.

If any of this confidential data is released without the family’s permission���even accidentally or as the result of a hack���the district runs the risk of legal liability. After a thorough examination, the result is generally a voluntary agreement that mandates specific improvements to the district’s digital defenses.

���Schools are in a bind these days,��� says Steve Caimi, senior cybersecurity expert at network-equipment maker Cisco. ���Schools accumulate more and more student information every day that’s subject to FERPA and there’s potentially a hacker hiding behind every router.���

The best defense when it comes to keeping data secure is a good offense. Today, that means using a virtual private network (VPN) to guard sensitive or confidential data. As its name implies, a VPN keeps a school’s data private while it is traveling on the open web.

Because the added security is virtual, a VPN doesn’t require an expensive dedicated physical data line between district facilities.

A VPN’s extra security allows only those at both ends of the online conversation to view the data, creating a private internet. ���Every school needs to have and use a VPN to secure its communications,��� says James Punderson IV, president of K12USA, a provider of security hardware and services for schools.

���Without one, everything that teachers do online is potentially wide open to snooping and interception. It is absolutely essential today.���

Questions of speed and cost

The way a VPN works boils down to hiding in plain sight. As opposed to using the web, with the ever-present danger of someone snooping or planting malicious software on a system, VPN data travels over the same cables and routers of the internet���but everything is encrypted.

For instance, a teacher sending grade reports to the district’s server could be open to interception by an enterprising hacker. When a VPN encrypts the data stream, everything is kept secret (See sidebar below, ���Let’s Get Technical���).

All this encrypting has two big drawbacks: speed and cost. Because it takes time to encode and decode the web address and data, the typical VPN adds latency���the time you wait for data to go from source to destination���and can slow upload and download speeds.

���There’s a small penalty for using a VPN,��� says Kyle Bisignani, lead technologist at New Jersey’s Hopatcong Borough Schools. ���You hardly notice it when doing school business, though.���

The big VPN snag is that it can be expensive due to the hardware and software required, which might add up to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. ���If you’re connected, you’re vulnerable,��� adds Cisco’s Caimi. ���It’s a big investment for some districts, but I can’t imagine any school not using a VPN today.���

In-house or outsourced?

Large districts tend to buy and operate their own VPN hardware. Take Mesa Public Schools in Arizona, with 64,000 students, 70 schools and a VPN that cost $100,000 to set up four years ago. ���It is a major part of the district’s security plan,��� says Dave Sanders, the district’s chief information officer.

The VPN secures communications for staff, students and outside vendors who need access to the district’s network. ���It provides an additional layer of security by encrypting traffic when staff or students connect to an open, unsecured network,��� says Sanders.

Some smaller districts, such as Hopatcong Borough Schools, follow a different VPN path. The district has 1,500 students, five schools and a central office, but doesn’t own its VPN hardware. Instead, K12USA provides Hopatcong with a VPN for $2,500 per year. The service also provides a firewall and website filtering.

Rather than running all communications over it, Hopatcong uses the VPN primarily when schools interact with legacy human relations and payroll software that’s housed at the district’s headquarters. Without the VPN, all the data would potentially be open to snooping.

���We could not have afforded traditional VPN hardware,��� says Bisignani, the district’s lead technologist. ���For us, the most cost-effective way to get the security of a VPN was to treat it as a service. To get that level of protection with our own VPN would have cost us tens of thousands of dollars at a minimum���money we didn’t have.���

Sleeping well at night

There’s an alternate approach for districts on a very tight budget: Consider doing all sensitive work while protected by a software VPN, which requires an annual subscription of under $100. It works best for schools with one or two people who need this level of protection.

Like with dedicated VPNs, communications are encrypted, but the heavy lifting is done by a cloud service. There’s even a free VPN that’s part of the Opera web browser. But, rather than being encrypted for the entire journey from screen to screen, software VPNs encrypt the data only as far as the service provider’s servers.

For the last part of the web journey���from the service provider’s hardware to its destination���the data is open to the world of hackers.

While important, a VPN is not for every online use. It can help make routine data transfers more secure, tighten up the movement of files between teachers and allow contractors limited access to the district’s network.

That said, Cisco’s Caimi says the costs and lost performance mean that a VPN probably shouldn’t be used for distance learning, videoconferences or similar activities.

A VPN is just a part of a school’s digital defenses. Each institution should assess its entire risk profile individually, but the plan needs to cover data interception, malicious software, and training teachers and students to practice good digital hygiene.

���Any school security plan is a balance between cost and hassle on one side, and openness on the other,��� says Caimi. ���A VPN can let you sleep well at night by managing the risk.���

Brian Nadel is a freelance writer in Pelham, New York.

The post Shields up! Your school’s private internet appeared first on District 91心頭istration.

“Figuring out which tech belongs in education is just the start” says Kelly J. Calhoun, research director at Gartner Research, a Connecticut-based market analysis firm. “The real hard work is adapting it to help in the classroom.”

Hundreds of new technologies appear every decade, but only a few end up having a lasting impact on education. We pulled out District 91心頭istration’s crystal ball to forecast some of the major tech trends now gaining momentum. The seven scenarios that follow represent our ideas for how the next generation of hardware, software and services can have a positive impact on education.

“We’re often wrong when we try to predict the future” adds Calhoun, “but the act makes us think about what we need today and how we can provide it tomorrow. The thought process is what’s important.”

Online hand-in

Forget about paper worksheets, local networks and USB thumb drives. While we have not quite reached the paperless classroom stage, the future of homework lies in sophisticated learning management systems with online storage repositories.

When students transfer work to the online storage center, a notification pops up on the teacher’s dashboard. In addition to alerting teachers that the work has been turned in, the software can show who is late or who has missed assignments.

“This way nothing can fall into the cracks” says Calhoun. More to the point, connected schools can transfer this information to parents to let them know if their children are keeping up.

Timeline: Now

Super screens

Computer, phone and tablet screens have improved a lot in the past few years with resolution that rivals expensive TVs. It’s just the start, because most still use liquid crystal display panels that require a power-hungry light in back to illuminate the image.

Last year brought early organic light emitting diode (OLED) screens to tablets, but 2017 will see a proliferation of this technology. The key difference is that these displays not only create their own light and use less power, but they can be made thinner for super-skinny devices. For instance, Calhoun looks forward to when we’ll use tablets and notebooks that are just 0.2-inches thick.

Timeline: 2017

Go Blue (5.0)

The first four generations of Bluetooth have made it easy to connect wireless speakers, printers and a lab full of STEM sensors, without a cable in sight. The fifth-generation Bluetooth specification will arrive later this year and it promises to double peak data throughput and extend range four-fold for better reliability and a variety of new uses.

That’s just the start, because Bluetooth 5.0 can create “mesh-based micro-networks” that can cover the classroom. This technique lets each computer act like a wireless extender to connect with other nearby devices, which then connect with others, and so on.

Such daisy-chaining can link an entire classroom of computers together without adding to a school’s already burdened Wi-Fi network. But, as was the case with earlier Bluetooth versions, it will take years before all systems have these capabilities and can join in, says Mark Powell, executive director of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group.

Timeline: Mid-2017

Mix and match

The Chromebook has taken the K12 classroom by storm because of its rugged designs and low price tag, but software has always been the platform’s Achilles heel. But that’s about to change as Google combines the software of Android tablets with Chromebooks.

You won’t need to choose between Android or Chromebook systems or get both platforms to cover all the bases. Chromebooks will do both.

Right now, the software works on a handful of Chromebook models, but later in 2017 Google will release its Andromeda software that allows most recent Chromebooks to use Android apps, from curriculum to student information systems to gradebooks.

“This opens a new world for students and teachers and expands the realm of instructional options at no additional cost” says Calhoun.

And Andromeda software will also lead to an increased emphasis on doing as much work as possible in the cloud.

Timeline: 2017

Internet of things in education

Someday everything in a school, from door locks and thermostats to lighting fixtures and surveillance cameras will be connected and remotely controllable by servers. When a teacher and students arrive for class, the door of the room automatically unlocks, the lights come on, the projector fires up and the air conditioner starts. That’s the internet-of-things vision for the classroom.

But not all computer-controlled components have enough power for this version of the future. For instance, you don’t want a door lock that is plugged in. Enter the University of Washington’s passive Wi-Fi.

Instead of a powerful wireless transmitter sucking up power in a device, the data it sends and receives piggybacks on existing Wi-Fi transmissions���like how a surfer rides a wave to shore.

It is a huge undertaking. Schools will have to wait for the components���such as door locks and thermostats���to be made and sold. That’s why low-power transmissions are so important: They can expand the internet of things in schools.

The result is moving Wi-Fi up to about 10 Mbps���plenty for command and control functions���using 10,000 times less power because the school’s existing Wi-Fi network moves the data.

It will take years for this to come to fruition. Plus, there’s an inherent risk to a fully connected school: Such devices are open to hacker attacks, as was seen last fall when routers and thermostats were used as web robots to overwhelm popular websites with a distributed denial-of-service attack. It’s what Gartner’s Calhoun calls IoT’s dark side. “Each device has to be secured and encrypted as if it were a desktop PC or tablet” she says.

Timeline: 2020

Think like a machine

We often take Amazon’s artificial intelligence suggestions for what to buy, and we often interact with robotic phone operators. Why not teach with AI?

While the notion of robot teachers has spawned a whole genre of dystopian science fiction, many education technology experts think artificial intelligence has the power to personalize education while at the same time freeing instructors from some of the tedium of grading papers and tests.

To start, an AI teaching assistant can grade essays, geometry proofs and fill-in answers���freeing teachers to, well, teach more and spend more one-on-one time with students.

Next, curriculum will no longer take students through a series of predetermined tasks. AI has the pedagogical power to fully individualize instruction based on the student’s needs and interests, as well as the district’s standards.

For instance, the system could give math students sufficient practice in factoring before introducing them to quadratic equations.

Because of its learning-based structure, the more artificial intelligence is used, the better it will become.

Timeline: 2020+

In the end

Robot teachers, top-speed wireless connections and super-thin learning devices add up to a brave new world where schools continue to get more digital and more connected.

The goal is to make teachers more effective in preparing students for the future, which will have job opportunities that we can’t even imagine now.

While some of these innovations may take a decade and others might not pan out at all, in 10 years we might look back and wonder how we were ab

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