One of the great things about my job is seeing first hand the difference that N4L makes in schools.  A case in point is my recent visit to Howick Intermediate.

Howick Intermediate is a decile 5 intermediate school nestled in the eastern suburbs of Auckland.  It’s one of the oldest schools in Howick, having been opened in 1937 (originally as an area school and later changed to an intermediate).  It’s also going through somewhat of a major change at the moment with the both the long serving Principal leaving as well as the teacher in charge of IT.

This provides a great opportunity to reconsider how IT is used in the school and have a bigger focus on eLearning.  N4L’s Pond is something they are very excited about because it provides a  collaborative environment where teachers from Howick Intermediate can engage with other teachers around the country to equip the school with eLearning ideas.  One of the ideas to come out of this process was the decision to give students more of a voice in choosing the context for the way they’re taught through an inquiry based learning model. The outcomes are the same but  with involved teacher-guidance and input, the way they get there is, to an extent, up to the students.

At the same time, the school is attempting to move more of their IT infrastructure to the cloud.  An example of this is their Student Management System (SMS) which is currently stored on a an ageing server in danger of failure.  The logical step is to move it to the cloud.   However, this requires a pretty consistently good internet connection (I won’t mention the fact that a good internet connection is also required for all those important Facebook updates that the teachers have to do…)  This is where N4L’s Managed Network comes in.  The school has typically paid around $400 per month for an standard broadband connection with a speed of about 15Mbps down and 5Mbps up on a good day. They have got a relatively low data cap which means they are consistently charged extra for exceeding their data cap.  Any further services moved to the cloud would only make this situation worse.

The connection N4L will provide will be approximately 6 times faster, have uncapped data and of course it’s fully funded by the Ministry of Education.  This means that cloud based services can be implemented without the executive officer worrying how much it’s going to cost the school.  Yet another example of N4L making a real difference to a school.