For most people who left school around the turn of the millennium or a couple of years before, ICT in schools was likely to have consisted of little more than basic word processing and spreadsheet usage, with perhaps some particularly basic HTML thrown in.
It’s because of this why unless you’ve been involved in the educational industry recently, you’re likely to be surprised at just what’s expected of schools today when it comes to ICT.
And high quality wifi is a perfect example of a vital resource.
If you left school 10 years ago, this might seem like something that’s unthinkable – when you were at school, it had only just become common to get broadband at home and so to think of schools having access that’s completely wireless can be somewhat strange.
But the truth is that wifi in schools is not simply a recommendation, but a necessity.
Take this piece from earlier in the year on BBC.co.uk, which talks about how some pupils are failing to get the best learning experience due to a poor quality wifi connection.
The reason this is the case is that in today’s day and age, we’re quickly moving away from traditional classroom learning. Sure, pupils still head to classrooms for individual lessons, but it’s no longer always the case that a teacher speaks to 20 or 30 pupils on a subject and work is carried out on paper.
Instead, the e-learning experience is taking the educational world by storm. Pupils are being encouraged to use computers more than they ever have been – and outside of the standard ICT lessons – and many have the ability to bring their own devices into school to use, so to enhance the overall learning experience further.
But none of this is possible (or at least, not possible in the most effective way) without a high quality wireless internet connection; wifi that has absolutely minimal downtime and which is fast enough to support what could be hundreds of users at once.
Tablets or laptops could obviously be used to a certain extent, but if pupils are expected to download resources or upload projects to an intranet, for instance, how can this be possible without a reliable wifi network?
All parts of the educational industry are moving forward at a tremendous pace. No longer are ICT devices only used for the teaching of ICT, but they’re a part of most lessons and feature in the majority of classrooms around the country.
Something that is undoubtedly improving the learning experience, it so often relies on high quality wifi in schools – and if this isn’t in place, it could have the complete opposite effect and the learning experience may prove to be less beneficial and technically-focused than it was 10 years ago.