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Advice for Teachers

Implementing classroom management practices when using the Internet can enhance the effectiveness of a school's computer network for all users. This will allow for better network performance overall 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 in the classroom by individual teachers.

1. Reduce the load

Reduce the number of students accessing a page. If it is not already necessitated by the number of computers in the classroom, consider pairing up your students when accessing some websites. When giving demonstrations to a class, the use of a data projector will reduce the number of computers sharing the Internet link. This can have the effect of enhancing network performance and providing you with better Internet connection speeds.

2. The secret of Alt and Tab

By holding down the Alt key and then pressing the Tab key, you can switch between applications. Students can use this key sequence to hide what they are doing on the computer, especially when surfing the Internet or downloading data. They hit Alt and Tab as soon as their teacher looks. Teachers could use this key sequence to check which software applications a student is using.

3. Visit sites before class

If caching (pronounced cay-shing) is in use at your school, consider visiting web sites before class. Caching stores copies of webpages locally on computers, so that when you return to a webpage, your Internet browser will source the page from the local computer rather than the Internet. With caching employed, teachers can optimise Internet connection speeds during class time by visiting before class the Internet sites their students will access to complete school work.

4. Email a link, not a document

Store documents on a shared drive, which other people can access from within your school. That way, when emailing the documents to other people within your school, you can email the file path instead of the document. This walkthrough can show you how. 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.

5. Spam emails

Under no circumstances should you reply to Spam email or try to 'unsubscribe'. All this does is confirm that your 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, you increase the load on the system. You also become guilty of sending Spam yourself.

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