Laptops replace bookbags

Communications News, Dec, 1998 by David Rockwell

Lady's Island middle school and pilot sister school get wired for wireless.

In Beaufort County, S.C., schoolchildren celebrated another special fall holiday, in addition to traditional ones. During the third "Out of the Box Party," several hundred Toshiba Laptops were placed in students' hands through the county's continuing participation in the Microsoft Learning with Laptops program. With the help of a community-based Schoolbook Foundation, students in the county's three middle schools have been given the opportunity to lease or purchase Toshiba laptop computers for use at school. There are now 2,017 students with laptops in Beaufort schools, 700 of them at Lady's Island Middle School.

When Lady's Island Junior High School opened in 1984, my first job was to implement the computer program. Through prior involvement with the school district's first technology task force and after teaching classes in the school's computer lab for eleven years, I eventually volunteered to become the full-time instructional technology coordinator. Along with this position came the responsibility of installing the $750,000 network for which I had lobbied. Another of my tasks was to integrate Toshiba laptops into the school's networked technology resources.

Today Lady's Island is a middle school (grades 6-8) with 1,300 students. Each level is organized into four self-contained pods with four classrooms housing a team of about 100 students and four teachers. Each pod area has one large screen computer and five desktops with printers on mobile carts and is wired with five network ports. With as many as 20 to 30 laptop students in any given class requiring access to the Internet or programs on the school's server, the need for an improved networking solution rapidly became apparent. I explored various options.

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

Adding portable hubs to existing ports and placing Ethernet PCMCIA cards in the laptops was one way to expand network connection, but this meant more patch cords Crisscrossing the classroom, and the fragile attachment typical of most PCMCIA cards did not seem robust enough for use by hundreds of 12- to 14-year-olds. The laptops came with modem cards, rather than the more expensive combo cards, so parents or the school would have the expense of adding these cards.

A more durable yet expensive solution was using some kind of docking station. The advantage of this approach is that the docking stations can be moved from room to room, sit solidly on a desk, and allow students to rotate "docking" their laptop onto the network on an as-needed basis without removing cards or reattaching patch cords. However, this approach still did not provide access for more than four laptops at a time.

Infrared technology was another option, since the Toshibas already came with an IR port built in. IR transmitters are about $300, but the need for a line-of-sight signal has severe implications for classroom arrangement. With so many laptops, a desktop-level transmitter would be impractical. Ceiling mounts are often recommended for IR networks, but the IR port in most laptops is not positioned to necessarily take advantage of ceiling mounted transmitters. Without the installation of a special card aimed at the ceiling, access might not be possible. Assuming the existing port could access a signal from above, multiple ports would undoubtedly be needed. Ceiling mounts would quickly use up each room's network drops, leaving nothing for the existing desktops. Since the IR signal is confined to a single room, the potential cost of outfitting every classroom in the building made this an unacceptable option.

WAVE ACCESS POINTS THE WAY

Still searching, I attended a wireless networking workshop at the National School Boards Association's Technology and Learning Conference presented by Allan Scott of Wave Access and Michael Willett of Open Minds Computing Solutions. I left convinced that Wave Access might have a cutting-edge technology worth investigating. I returned to our site-based school and initiated my own wireless pilot in one of our 7th grade pods.

I ordered 20 Wave Access Jaguar PC132 laptop cards and two Access Points (APs) which connected to the network using an existing network port and electrical outlet. The APs broadcast a spread spectrum signal for a range of about 300 feet. The range varies depending on what the signal has to pass through. The wireless cards fit a standard Type II PCMCIA card slot on the laptop.

Unless access for a specific set of laptops must be restricted to a particular AP, they are ready to go as soon as you plug them in. Restricting access involves configuring each AP with a separate ID number. This was not an issue, as I wanted universal access throughout the building to allow students to carry their laptops to their related arts classes. The APs also perform automatic load balancing; if a laptop moves out of the range of one AP, it is automatically picked up by another that is in range without interrupting the transmission of data. A monitoring program called Wave Scout can be installed on a laptop and used to test the range and throughput of the wireless signal at any location in the building.