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EDITOR’S QUESTION
MATHEW EDWARDS,
DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT
MARKETING, AEROHIVE
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W
hile it’s difficult to quantify the
direct impact of technology on
students’ learning experience and
improved grades, an increasing number of
schools across the UK are incorporating the
use of a range of devices into the classroom,
especially as coding becomes part of the
standard curriculum. In fact, the global
education technology market is expected
to grow from US$43.27 billion in 2015 to
US$93.76 billion in 2020, a compound
annual growth rate of nearly 17%.
At the very least, most agree that technology
is improving engagement and collaboration
amongst students and teachers and is
encouraging students to learn in new and
different ways. Technology enables teachers
to enhance the way they teach and helps
administrators to see what’s really happening
on the school network, so they can visualise
problems before they happen and plan
without overprovisioning. As an added bonus,
new solutions allow IT teams to have a
network that can be configured to maintain
security and privacy, while automating
processes to the greatest degree possible.
However, the only way to ensure these
benefits are brought to life is to ensure
there is a reliable wireless network in place
connecting with students’ devices – whether
that be mobile phones, laptops or iPads. The
question is, how does the wireless network
fade out of view so that teachers can simply
focus on teaching? Wi-Fi must become
something that works extremely well. It
needs to work well in all situations and be
able to expand and evolve as schools do. It
needs to be upgradable, easy to manage
from the cloud and remain within the
school’s budget.
Meeting these requirements becomes
an issue when considering many schools
don’t have dedicated in-house networking
experts. Wi-Fi-based networking is changing
www.intelligentcio.com
rapidly and continuously, and makes use
of specialised terms, gear and jargon that
can be bafflin