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Advice for Principals and School Administrators

Increased usage of bandwidth has a direct cost to schools. The effective management of the available bandwidth can reduce these costs and enhance the effectiveness of school computer networks. This will allow for better network performance and will enhance the delivery of student learning outcomes.

The following points provide suggestions to assist in managing your network. These points focus on strategies that can be implemented by the school leadership team.

1. Schedule your downloads

Staff can help network speeds during teaching periods by downloading large files outside of teaching periods. This will have the dual effect of providing quicker download speeds for large files and will also provide quicker network speeds for teachers during class times.

2. Email a link, not the document

When collaborating on a document with peers within your school, or emailing documents to students, locate the file on a shared drive and email the path instead of the entire document. This walkthrough can assist with this process. Alternatively, if there is a need to send the document as an attachment, many of the operating systems in use today provide a file compression function similar to WinZip. Use this compression function to reduce the size of the file before attaching it to the email. To learn how to compress a file, follow this walkthrough.

3. Choose your timing when sending some emails

If staff cannot locate a document on a shared drive, and have to email it to other staff within the school, perhaps they can consider their timing. Is it necessary to send that email during class times when there may be a large number of Internet users logged onto the network? It can be suggested to staff that emails that either have large attachments or those that are not time-critical be sent outside of teaching periods.

4. Can students access the Internet outside of teaching periods?

Students' desire to surf the web to conduct legitimate research during class time may be motivated by limited opportunities outside of the classroom to conduct such activities. You may consider looking into the provision of supervised Internet sessions during the long break or before and after school to allow students to conduct legitimate web-based research. This will have the dual effect of reducing the number of students not focussing during classes and will improve bandwidth availability during teaching periods.

5. Spam emails

Spam emails contribute to poor network speeds and there have been instances of some schools receiving over one thousand Spam emails in a day. Staff and students need to be made aware that under no circumstances should they reply to Spam email or try to 'unsubscribe'. All this will do is confirm the email address is active. Your email address will then be added to a list and sold to other entities and you will receive even more Spam emails. Spam email very rarely comes from the person in the From field. In most cases, this From address has been hijacked (called spoofed) from a legitimate person or organisation. By replying, staff and students increase the load on the system. They also become guilty of sending Spam.

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