Providing home broadband to students

[KevinB]

Morning all,

 

I've been asked to investigate options for providing pupil premium students with home broadband and a Chromebook. Chromebooks aren't an issue but do any of you have experience of providing home broadband for your students? My first reaction is that it could be fraught with potential pitfalls like filtering, liability in the event of misuse etc.

 

Any thoughts/experiences to share?

 

Thanks!

[Steve21]

I'd have to query as to why they need it? Surely that's the reason you have things like library open later in the school. Generic teacher "research" doesn't require it etc.

 

Fair enough to the computer as it can be used to write things etc, but do you force all your students to have internet access before they join the school? If not then surely the same applies to others.

 

We had this discussion before at another school and found so many problems with it basically it's unusable in any safe degree. What happens if another person (within or outside the family) uses the internet and connects their devices to it? Runs over data limit? Looks at X-rated materials etc etc Who's responsible for maintenance/support of it? How do you stop them making changes to it if they control it? What if they move house etc? Who deals with any charges/supplier related issues?

 

We were looking at options like a direct VPN route within the router straight to the school network but then costs start increasing all over.

 

Steve

[KevinB]

With you all the way on those problems, and they will definitely feature stongly in whatever write-up I send to senoir management with potential solutions. The whole idea of providing broadband that it not under our direct control is problematic in my view. A VPN/VDI solution is on the safer side but as you say... £££ start to come into the picture much more then.

[localzuk]

Every school I've heard off who provide a similar setup don't provide home broadband - they instead issue a device with 3g built in and then have that under the school's control/contract. You can even have it connect direct back to your school and therefore use your in-house filtering also. I know Andrews & Arnold offer such a system for 3g data sims.

[SchoolsBroadband]

We've done this for quite a few schools using 3G and 4G sim cards when they have 1:1 ipad deployments.

 

The biggest problem when using mobile though is the coverage. If an area can only get 2G then there's not really much point in having it as it'll be so slow.

 

As standard we can filter all 3G and 4G connections and link this into our hosted Ligthspeed filtering product so they are protected too. Mobile has the advantage of not being overly expensive and once a user hits a set data limit the connection can be throttled if required so no big data bills get sent.

 

PM me if you're interested.

 

Thanks

 

Dave