Greetings WUSD Staff,
Over the past several weeks, we
have experienced decreased functionality of our wireless network that has
impacted classrooms across the district. Many of you have reported your
experiences directly to me or my staff and my team has also seen these issues first
hand. As a former classroom teacher, I understand the frustration that you
have felt when the wi-fi has failed you and your students. I have been
pushing the IT team to bring resolution to the issues experienced in the
classrooms. I wanted to update you today on what has happened behind the scenes
so that you have a better understanding of what we are working on to solve the
wi-fi issue.
WAVE Access (Internet)
We are working with the WAVE
engineers to examine the equipment installed as part of our district circuit
upgrade last Spring from 100 MB to 1 GB (10 times faster). We have tested
our connection both in front of the firewall (the equipment that protects our
district network from outsiders) and from behind the firewall and in both
instances had the same speeds totaling about half of what we believe we should
be receiving. Tomorrow at 7:30 am, WAVE will be replacing the Small Form
Pluggable (SFP) that essentially connects the Internet to their equipment at
YCOE that provides WUSD’s Internet. They will do the same with their equipment
located here at the district office at 5:00 pm. IF YOU ARE
ON THE NETWORK AT EITHER OF THESE TIMES, YOU MAY EXPERIENCE A LOSS OF
CONNECTIVITY OR DATA. Please allow 10-15 minutes for the
equipment to be swapped. This testing of the equipment will provide the
team with information regarding our network speeds from the WAVE circuits.
Extreme Wi-Fi Access Points
(Dissemination of the Internet to devices)
Across the district, we use
access points from Extreme to connect the Chromebooks to the network and
Internet. We’ve noticed alarming activity that has required manually resetting
access points for classrooms. This is not typical and more anomalies were found
in the logs that prompted the team to reach out to Extreme to review our
configurations and settings for the access points. In reviewing the settings
for the access points, it was determined adjustments were needed as part of a
revision in best practices for the network that we have today vs. the network
that we had when the equipment was installed. It is believed the changes made
on the access points could potentially alleviate many of the issues experienced
in Chrome and on Chromebooks.
iBoss (Filtering of the Internet)
We are required by Federal law to
abide by the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) to prevent harmful or
pornographic material reaching our students. The iBoss filter serves this need
by allowing and disallowing websites into our classrooms. When you make a
request for a site to be unblocked, the iBoss filter is where we make an
exception (assuming it is okay, of course). With our G Suite environment
(formerly known as Google Apps for Education or GAFE), we are challenged with
making a somewhat static service respond to the dynamic nature of Google
(always making changes with little or no notice). IT staff has been nimble and
making adjustments to the G Suite administrative dashboard and the iBoss filter
to keep up with troubleshooting challenges we see in the classrooms around the
G Suite services (Classroom, Drive, etc.). Again, IT staff reached out to
iBoss engineers for a review of our current configuration of the iBoss filter
and it was determined modifications need to be made to provide the best online
learning environment for our students. IT staff is in the process of making
those changes to optimize G Suite performance.
All these activities above have
been happened or are in the process of happening in response to the issues that
we are seeing in classrooms. As we continue to add more devices to the network
and the Tech team works to support classrooms, we will have issues that come
up. At the beginning of the 2015-2016 school year on August 30, the
7 day average of active devices on the network was 423. Last week, the 7 day
average of active devices was 3,547. We have grown considerably in the
last year! As a department, we will always strive to be
responsive to the needs of students and classrooms but sometimes there are no
quick, simple fixes. We are hoping that between these three changes that the
network will better serve your classrooms.
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