Network will link eight EVSD buildings
East Valley School District will take a huge leap forward in the technology world with the installation of high-speed fiber optic between eight of the school district’s buildings.
Columbia Fiber Solutions, a provider of private data networks, will supply the district with a Gigabit Ethernet Wide Area Network.
“As far as the network is concerned we’re now one big building as opposed to a bunch of separate buildings for communications and for data and networking. That allows us to have the speed to run applications between our buildings that we would never have been able to do before,” said Brian Wallace, director of technology for the district.
Wallace said this will take them from a speed of 1.5 mega bits per second to 1,000 mega bits per second, shared by the schools, increasing the band-width 800-fold.
The goal is to have everything in place by the end of the first semester, sometime in December.
The district has a decent connection to the Internet but they have 1,500 computers connected, not just one. They needed to ramp-up the infrastructure, Wallace said.
One example of how students and teachers will benefit from the improved network capacity in the classroom is the use of “unitedstreaming,” a digital video-based learning resource from Discovery Education. Teachers have access to 50,000 lessons from 5,000 full-length educational videos.
Teachers use this to supplement their instruction. If they’re doing a lesson on Washington state history they may get a 15-minute video.
“Right now, we’re getting that over the internet and because we don’t have the band-width needed, the teachers have to wait until after school hours to search the video library and download lessons during off-times. If they were to download during the middle of the day, it would kill the network,” said Wallace.
With the new network teachers can get lessons in real time. “That sounds like a little thing, but when the technology becomes easier to use, it becomes more like a light switch that you can just turn on.”
The district applied for E-Rate Funding, a federal program that provides discounts to schools and libraries for telecommunication, Wallace said. E-Rate is paying about 75 percent of the cost of project, or about $140,000 and the district’s cost is about $70,000.
“We’ve been holding back on some technology purchases in other areas so that we could proceed with this project. If you don’t have the network or the basics than those things that connect to it don’t work as well. This is like building an interstate highway, and that’s why it’s so important” said Wallace.