Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 09 | Page 37

+ EDITOR’S QUESTION MATHEW EDWARDS, DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT MARKETING, AEROHIVE ///////////////// 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