Connecting to the Internet – issues for schools

There is little doubt that the Internet has much to offer schools. It is an almost limitless source of information. However, access to the Internet carries a financial cost and presents schools with the problem of how best to enable their pupils to access the information which will support their learning.

Schools are not commercial institutions. They are in the business of providing education to children. In the state sector they are restricted in how much they can spend by the annual budget share they receive from the Local Education Authority (LEA). Private sector schools can raise money by increasing school fees, but they operate within a market economy and have to ensure they do not over-price their services. This chapter considers connectivity issues specific to schools, the costs of connectivity, how to protect children from inappropriate Internet content, and how to ensure information is available and accessible when it is needed in a classroom situation.

Obsolescent Computers and Connectivity

A problem reported by many EDSI projects was connecting to the Internet: "The problems in this area were legion…The important factor in creating problems was the disparate nature of the hardware which existed in schools and on to which Internet connectivity was to be grafted…The spread of the hardware was so wide that there was no simple solution which could be applied to all sites." (EDSI Group A Project 2 para: 2.27).

Most schools have not had a policy for the replacement of obsolescent ICT equipment. Teachers are paid to teach not to have technical expertise. School governing bodies may be fortunate enough to have amongst their membership somebody with technical interest and expertise, but generally there is not an awareness of the technical aspects of ICT. It is not surprising that EDSI also reported:

"The quite reasonable assumption on the part of the schools was that it would be simply a matter of connecting their network to the cable connection. On the other hand, the commercial sponsors were working on the reasonable assumption from their point of view that all the schools’ LANs would be of a sufficient standard to be connected easily… The main technical problem for schools has been the incompatibility of existing systems with those introduced by the suppliers." (EDSI Group A Observations and Recommendations para: 50 and 54).

In Chapter Three, I will return to the problem of legacy systems and software. Though many schools are in the process of replacing obsolescent equipment, many others continue to use not only elderly machines, but ones which present major compatibility problems. "Some schools are still making effective use of the BBC micro, after 16 years." (Banbury, 1999). Gordon primary school in south-east London is not unusual in learning that its ten-node LAN of 286-based RM Nimbus machines is no longer worth repairing, leaving the school with four usable machines, only one of which has Internet access. (Charlesworth, 1998).

This problem is not unique to the UK, but as the RM G7 Report says: "The most pressing problem for those countries that invested in ICT early on is how to replace ageing equipment that cannot cope with the new demands of multimedia software and networked computing." (RM, 1999). Japan, for example, now has a large number of schools with computers five years old compared with very few at the time of the last G7 survey in 1996. On the other hand Canada has adopted a nationwide replacement scheme leading to a notable reduction in the numbers of older machines. It can be anticipated that the NGfL investment will have a positive effect on the situation in the UK over the coming years.

Costs

The development of ICT represents a major and ongoing cost to schools. Most school budgeting is done on a revenue basis, and when large amounts of capital expenditure are required, it is usual to engage in fund-raising, including looking for specific grants. Although NGfL funding together with top-up funding from local authorities will assist with capital expenditure, schools need to budget for ongoing costs such as a subscription to an ISP and the cost of connection and call charges. The more general issue of forward planning and maintenance and management costs is dealt with in Chapter Six. The costs involved in Internet access for schools are difficult to ascertain as a number of telecommunications companies, including BT, have introduced special arrangements for schools.

There is a much quoted figure of £1 per pupil per year being the aim, but this is not the current reality. "A school of 45 pupils is paying £445 for the flat rate Schools Internet Caller tariff, £100 for ISP and £99 for a ‘phone line. £14 per annum per pupil." (Banbury, 1999). At the time of writing (March 1999), BT offers the following arrangement:

Line rental, plus unlimited calls (Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm) to any participating ISP for:

£445 per annum standard phone line (suitable for a single dial-up connection with a modem)
£790 per annum ISDN2 (128Kbps) phone line (with free connection where a new line is needed)

Where the connection is going to be in use for most of the school day by a large number of users, and for community use beyond the school day, a leased line may be a worthy of consideration. Park College, a Further Education college in Eastbourne has recently set up an Internet connection with a 128 Kbps Kilostream leased line at a cost of £5,000 per annum.

The NGfL is providing funding to assist schools in the purchase of equipment and software; it is not providing revenue funding. Schools are having to decide which essential expenditure to prioritise. A primary school may have less than £10,000 per annum available to spend on all its curriculum needs. Internet connectivity can account for more than ten per cent of this expenditure. This might be less problematic if ICT were the only development priority, but primary schools in particular are also being asked to prioritise literacy and numeracy.

Access to Inappropriate or Unsuitable Information

There is considerable public concern about young people accessing unsuitable information through the Internet both at school and at home. Though it is perhaps self-evident that Internet access in school is to support learning, it is still possible to access inappropriate material. Before providing Internet access for pupils, it is essential for a school to understand the potential risks and then evaluate the options for minimising these risks. In a school setting the three areas where control might be needed are:

Access to objectionable or inappropriate material. This may be deliberate, but is just as likely to be the result of a typing error, for example, typing www.microsofy.com rather than www.microsoft.com would confront a child with images and text which they might find confusing and might not know how to respond to.
Involuntary surfing – this occurs when information is sought on one subject and the user then goes on to follow links which may have minimal relevance to their area of enquiry. In itself, it is not harmful, but it can waste limited time and resources.
Casual surfing – rather than pursuing the set task, simply following any interesting or amusing links. This is clearly not an appropriate use of school resources, though it can be enjoyable in other contexts.

Strategies adopted by schools include:

Using a proxy server to provide a ‘walled garden’ to permit access to preselected sites only. Pupils have the sensation of using the Internet while only being able to use ‘safe’ sites. This approach is most suitable with younger children, but it can be frustrating for older pupils undertaking independent research.
Using an ISP offering filtered access. Filtering operates by either excluding or including sites that meet given criteria. Some specialist ISPs offer a service which excludes dubious sites. Others operate an ‘allow list’, for example BT’s Campus World has a list of over 3000 approved sites. Other sites can be accessed using a teacher’s password.
Installing filtering software on the school computers. There are many software packages available which will scan email or allow email only from known sources and permit the setting up of different levels of Internet access privilege for different groups of users.
Supervised use of Internet by a member of staff or a prefect or random checking of computer records of sites visited. The knowledge that a log is kept of web sites visited can be a deterrent against inappropriate use. It is possible to use software on the log to identify sites which contain inappropriate material.
A contract, or home-school agreement, signed by pupils and parents, setting out a policy for acceptable use of the Internet.

Appendix D describes the different approaches to filtering. It is clear than any attempt to exclude possibly harmful sites, or to only include known useful sites is going to lead to a number of sites being omitted that could be included, or being included when they should be excluded.

The issue is not only one of protecting children but has wider civil liberties implications. A recent Virginia federal court decision held that "once a public library decides to provide its patrons with Internet access, the blanket filtering of that Internet access violates the First Amendment". (David,1999) Although this case concerned a public library it opened the debate about blanket filtering in schools. The European Parliament debated the issues in 1997 without coming to a firm conclusion. (European Parliament, 1997).

Access to Appropriate Information

Education Portals

The Internet contains a vast wealth of information, some of which is relevant to the educational needs of school pupils, and much of which is not. Teachers do not have unlimited time to seek out new and interesting sites, and it is becoming imperative that ways are found of efficiently accessing reliable information. To be useful, information needs to be both relevant and accessible. In response to this need a number of education portals are being developed, both as part of the NGfL and independently of it. The idea is not a new one; in America sites such as Global SchoolNet and Web66 have supported school use of the Internet. In the UK, RM’s Internet for Learning contains a searchable database of sites suitable for use with the National Curriculum and BT’s CampusWorld provides both links to other sites and specific educational content and projects.

Alongside these generalist resources, a number of specialist resources are being developed by professional organisations. The Economics and Business Education Association set up a site to support teachers of business and economics in 1996 and funds a full-time member of staff to maintain it. Other specialist sites include MathsNet, Spartacus – providing history resources, and sites maintained by the Association for Science in Education and the Religious Education Exchange Service.

With the development of the NGfL, many LEAs are beginning to include educational materials on their intranets, and some of these resources are publicly available. The NGfL has a Virtual Teachers Centre on its site which acts as a resource centre and forum. The BBC also provides a wide range of educational materials in support of school broadcasting, and provides a searchable database.

It is possible that as school use of the Internet grows, the problem of finding curriculum appropriate materials will diminish, or even disappear. There may be a continuing problem of information overload if the number of high quality sites far exceeds the demand. However, if education portals are to be effective, they require expenditure on maintaining and updating them.

Web Caching

In order to use the Internet effectively in a classroom situation, schools need to be able to access material when they need it. At the time of writing, it is unclear whether local web caching will be affected by the recent European Parliament vote (Benjamin and Ranger, 1999), or by the discussion as to whether web caching contravenes the UK Copyright Act (Computing, 1999). For the present, many schools make use of a proxy server with web caching facilities rather than accessing the Internet directly for classroom exercises.

A proxy server is software which is installed on the server at the juncture of the Internet connection and the LAN. Where filtering software is used, some filtering software can be configured as a proxy server and other filtering software sits on the proxy server. Various proprietary software products are available which offer both web caching and a high level of security for determining which LAN users have access to the Internet connection and what they can access using that connection. A log is maintained of which users have accessed which sites.

The purpose of web caching is to maximise the use that can be made of an Internet connection by storing objects locally rather than having to download every object when it is requested. Local storage can reduce the overall amount of Internet access and speed up access to objects held locally. This can be valuable in a school setting where several pupils may need to access the same web site simultaneously.

A proxy server works by checking if it has the Internet object requested by a client in its cache before trying to retrieve the object from the Internet. If the object is not already cached, the software places a copy in its cache before passing it to the client. Objects held in the cache are passed to the client application as if they were Internet objects. The user is unable to distinguish whether the retrieved object is from the web cache or from the Internet. It is important that the web cache is set to a size large enough to effectively contain up-to-date copies of most objects being requested.

Some schools without networked Internet connections use software designed to download the whole or part of a web site. The software provides a cache facility which can be accessed through other computers on a school network. An example of such a product is Web Whacker, which can be set up to download a given number of levels of a web site, with or without links.

Using web caching has an additional advantage to schools in offering faster access to materials than accessing them when needed from the Internet. The school LAN offers a broader bandwidth and faster data transfer than an Internet connection.

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