Getting smart on wireless in the classroom

As a student at Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton Elementary School in Shrub Oak, New York, the most advanced technology I was exposed to in the classroom was a calculator--and the nuns teaching us math and science showed their approval of such devices with a slap on the wrist and a swift confiscation. When I reached college, I didn't even have my own PC; instead, I banged out term-papers on my Brother word processor or trudged to the computer lab or sucked up to a friend who was lucky enough to own their own PC.

Yes, I'm dating myself badly, and the state of technology in the education sector has certainly changed dramatically over the past 10-15 years with the widespread use of PCs, laptops, and wired and wireless internet connections. But we are on the cusp of another technology revolution within the education sector and classroom environment: The use of wireless to transform the way teachers teach and students learn and live. And the lessons learned in the wireless classroom will provide educational not only for students, but for business leaders in enterprises in other sectors who are struggling with understanding how wireless and mobile technologies will impact their businesses, employees, and customers.

At last week's CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment conference in San Diego, I had the opportunity to moderate a panel entitled "Wireless in the Classroom" featuring a diverse set of panelists across the value chain. Peggy Casey from Cisco talked about the increasing use of WLAN networking across various educational campus settings. Fraser Edward from Research In Motion discussed how Blackberries are spreading out beyond the corporate environment, being adopted by students and promoted by institutions as an adjunct to traditional computing devices. Mohit Bhargava represented a start-up called LearningMate Solutions which is introducing new applications to transform the way students learn using mobility. Hans Brons whose company iRex Technology makes e-Paper technology enlightened the audience on the demand for eReaders on campuses. And Sakhr Software CTO Rami Safadi displayed how real-time mobile speech-to-speech translation software can assist learning across languages. This one panel represented just the tip of the iceberg of mobility activities happening in the education sector, with companies large and small setting their sites on the market.

Education has been a sector desperately in need of mobile solutions for years, with campus environments that crave ubiquitous connectivity solutions, and a diverse set of constituents needing that connectivity, including students, faculty, administration, and support staff. Indeed, education has been well ahead of the curve in terms of WLAN adoption. According to Yankee Group's 2009 Transforming Infrastructure and Transforming Applications Survey, education decision-makers indicated about 15 percent of their target end-users were connected wirelessly three years ago, compared with 9 percent in all other industries. Today that has increased to almost 30 percent in the education sector (compared with 24 percent in others). And students are more likely to bring their own advanced devices to campus. According to Yankee Group's 2009 Anywhere Consumer Survey, smartphone use among the 16-17, 18-19, and 20-24 year-old age groups is 21 percent, 24 percent and 27 percent respectively, outpacing overall market adoption of 18 percent. The use of 3G wireless USB dongles is also higher than average among these age groups, especially 18-19 year-olds who report 6.5 percent adoption to the overall market average of 3.6 percent.

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