Breaking the Internet

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Yesterday I ran an inset day for staff at a primary school. The aim of the day was to introduce my cloud based ICT scheme of work. This normally involves firstly talking to staff about digital competence, as it's been written in a way that I believe will address the new digital competence areas. I then plan in an opportunity to log into the cloud platforms mentioned in the scheme and look at some of the available tools. In this particular school the focus was on Office 365 and J2E, both of which are available through the Hwb platform. First part of the morning ran smoothly until we all tried logging onto Hwb. Internet access ground virtually to a standstill. Pages were taking an age to load, if they loaded at all. So, here am I talking about moving much of the school's ICT curriculum to the cloud and about 28 people in an ICT suite bought the internet to a complete halt in the school. Very frustrating and disappointing. However, the staff were understanding, and amazingly patient with the difficulties we were experiencing. I must have struggled to demonstrate O365 for about 45 mins until I made the decision to bring that section to a premature end. Now just imagine that I was doing that with a class of pupils. How long would I have struggled until I stopped the lesson and did something else, 10 minutes? Poor internet access is still a problem in some schools I visit, especially the more rural ones. I'm anticipating that the new digital competence framework is going to strongly highlight on-line communication and collaboration, but how are schools in the same position as this one, going to be able to deliver aspects of it effectively? The staff in the school told me that this was what their internet access was like and today's problems were not unique. This really isn't fair for the them or the pupils in that school or others in a similar situation. In the afternoon they did 'double up' to share a computer with someone else and we were able to successfully access and use the J2E platform. But doubling up so that only about 15 users were accessing the internet should not be the answer, especially in a room that had enough computers for everyone.

I can see some challenges for schools when they introduce the framework from September, and underpinning it all I believe is the need for schools to have a reliable, robust and resilient infrastructure. If that's not in place then in my opinion it's going to be difficult for some schools to implement aspects of the framework effectively. Schools, local authorities and the Welsh Government really need to work together to find a solution for schools experiencing these internet issues. The Learning in Digital Wales (LiDW) grants from the Welsh Government was amongst other things, meant to address broadband and WiFi issues in schools. But as can be seen from my experience yesterday, it hasn't been very successful in all cases. Here's my list of some of the pinch points for schools that I think need addressing if the implementation of framework is going to be a success:

- Reliable, robust and resilient infrastructure (Internet, WiFi, network, devices)
- Enough digital technologies
- Appropriate digital technologies
- Staff digital competence to confidently deliver the framework

Anyone else out there in schools who find they regularly 'break the internet'?