I am writing this blog post on a Saturday morning in the auditorium of a public K-12 Kentucky high school. Not MY district’s high school. I’m in a nearby high school (whose district shall be nameless) because I am a volunteer parent judge for a speech and drama contest, and due to a scheduling snafu I have a free hour and a half.
I’m mostly writing a blog entry because I can’t get on the wi-fi here to get anything productive done. When I search for wi-fi access points on this iPad mini that I’m writing on, I see two AP’s. One is called “NAMEOFDISTRICTwireless” and is a secured AP. The other is called “NAMEOFDISTRICTpersonal” and it is an open access point. However, when I connect to it I am immediately taken to an authentication page where I am supposed to put in a username and password. I have no such username and password for this page, and there is no link to access the network via guest access, so I am stuck.
That’s no big concern to me. As a CIO, I understand why the network is set up the way that it is. The network is setup for students and staff to bring in their personal devices to use for instructional purposes throughout the school day, and the login does two things: 1) It ensures that only students and staff are accessing the network, and 2) By forcing students and staff to log in with their district username and password, it allows the district to track usage. Both of these reasons are important and necessary, AND I understand that.
But I am not here today to write about me. As I sit here in the back of this auditorium, I am within earshot of the “help desk” that is on the other side of this wall. The help desk was setup by the speech and drama team to answer questions that judges and students have, and I am here today to write about those questions. Since I have pulled out my iPad, I have heard 15 questions asked of the people behind the table, and nine of those questions have been about the Wi-fi. Everyone wants to know how to get on. Everyone is ASSUMING that the wi-fi is available to them. I heard one woman say, “I really need to get on and update my blog, and I just assumed because we were at a school that there would be wi-fi available.”
Another woman replied, “That must only be at colleges.”
Several people complained in such a short period of time that the speech sponsor from the school called several students from the school over and asked them, “Do you know how to get on the personal wireless?”
“No,” the student said. “No one in the school that I’ve talked to has EVER known how to get on. I mean, we have a username and password for the regular computers, but I don’t think the wireless password is the same” (It almost certainly is).
One woman finally said, “I could be so productive if only I could get on! This is certainly going to be in my comments in my evaluation of the day!” I then heard what I assumed were her shoes clip clop angrily down the hallway.
What’s my point? I was blown away by how much these people EXPECTED wi-fi to be available to them, and how shocked they were when it wasn’t. And I guess as CIO’s we need to consider how to handle this. My district currently allows ANYONE to get on our network, but that’s not the ideal solution, especially when one considers how close some homes are to several of our schools. It is entirely possible that some of those people are using our network for free Internet access.
We are working to correct that. We have purchased from our network vendor software that will allow us to authenticate devices just like this district is doing, and we are in the process of setting that up (should be finished before the end of this next work week). Our splash page, though, WILL have a guest access link on it. That link won’t work during the school day,but it will work after school until midnight during the week and from 4 AM until midnight on the weekends. We felt like we needed to supply it.
And based on the reaction from the adults here today, I’d say we made the right call.
It’s funny. If this school’s SSID were hidden or secured, I think that most people would have not assumed it was for them. I think that maybe naming the SSID “personal” might be the problem. Visitors assume that the network is there for their “personal” use. Maybe if it had been named “DISTRICTNAMEstudentbyod” or something like that then it wouldn’t have felt so personal to people when they couldn’t get on.
In any event, at least the lack of wi-fi gave me an excuse to write my first blog post on here in about six months. And I can say this, too: Writing on the iPad mini is only slightly more annoying than writing on a full sized iPad. I would have assumed that I would have made many more mistakes on the smaller screen, but not really.