What you can do
How school staff can help
All staff and students are bound by the department's code of conduct for Internet use.
Limit use to educational and business purposes
While limited use of Internet and email services for personal purposes is acceptable during employee's non-work time if it is infrequent and brief, its primary purpose is for education and business. Try to limit Internet use by all staff and students within your school to educational and business purposes.
If required, the MIS Administrator can limit access to certain websites. Information and instructions on restricting access to websites can be found on the 'Blocking and unblocking websites' section of the Smart Classrooms Web Filtering website.
Monitor the schools top ten download sites and downloaders (staff & students) on a regular basis. While many websites can be used for educational purposes, their frequent use can impact on the overall bandwidth available for other educational sites and services.
Principals can monitor staff and students' access to websites through a series of reports available through the MIS portal. These reports reveal the top sites visited by staff and students, the top 10 downloaders at each school each week. For more information, view the instructions for principals (PDF, 263k).
Do students and teachers use the Internet to listen to the radio? If they do, ensure it's for educational or business purposes. This is a major contributor to slow connection speeds.
Schedule downloads
Keep downloads to a bare minimum by ensuring they relate to education or business. Also, schedule downloads before 9am or after 3pm, especially if downloading larger files such as software, music, videos, photos or audio. Internet speeds are slowest during school hours, when more students and staff are using the Internet.
Stream outside peak periods
If you need to stream or download videos on sites such as the ABC's Behind the News, try scheduling the download outside peak usage times.
Consider visiting websites before class. Caching stores copies of webpages locally on computers, so when you return to a webpage, your Internet browser will source the page from the local computer rather than the Internet.
With caching, you can optimise Internet connection speeds during class time by visiting before class the Internet sites your students need to access for learning.
How corporate office and school admin staff can help
All staff are bound by the department's code of conduct for Internet use.
Limit your use to educational and business purposes
While limited use of internet and email services for personal purposes is acceptable during employee's non-work time if it is infrequent and brief, its primary purpose is for education and business. Try to limit Internet use within your school to educational and business purposes.
If you use the Internet at work to listen to the radio, ensure it's for business purposes. This is a major contributor to slow connection speeds.
Schedule your downloads
Keep your downloading to a bare minimum by ensuring all downloads are business related. Schedule your downloads outside the peak period - 9am to 3pm Monday to Friday - when speeds are faster.
