Wireless Network Delivers Campus-Wide Wi-Fi for Melbourne Girls Grammar School
From K–12 to higher education, Meru helps schools transform the wireless network into a powerful enabler of teaching and learning. For more info visit: http://www.merunetworks.com
Catherine Misson, Principal, Melbourne Girls Grammar School
For 117 years, Melbourne Girls Grammar School has been specializing in education for girls. We’ve always seen ourselves as leading from the front, and there have been many phases in the development of the school, where we’ve adopted curriculum or technologies that have put us out amongst the benchmarks of international quality education for girls, and we saw technology as being absolutely essential to providing the level of flexibility and access that we wanted for our teachers, for our girls, and by extension or community.
When we reviewed our technology infrastructure in 2008, we decided to adopt wireless across the entire campus, so from prep to 12 all of our students and all of our teachers would have access to the network. The wireless is available through the entire campus. We worked very hard to make sure that there are no black spots. So our teachers and students can carry their technology with them out onto the field, between venues, and we can have impromptu learning activities anywhere that is needed.
Mary-Louise O’Brien, Director of eLearning, MGGS
The access to the Meru wireless network has enabled access anywhere, so anywhere over our campus, whether it’s a P.E. teacher out on the oval or a drama teacher in the drama studio, will have access, guaranteed access to the wireless network.
Catherine Misson, Principal, Melbourne Girls Grammar School
It’s ensured that lessons can be taught with confidence and planed with confidence, that the network will not disappoint the teachers in the delivery or the students in the access to the variety of the activituies that have been planned.
Mary-Louise O’Brien, Director of eLearning, MGGS
The Meru wireless network has been a real enabler in our classrooms. It’s given the teachers and students confidence, particularly the teachers in planning their lessons. We use a learning management system here, and they know that when they walk into the classroom that that will work and they will be able to access all their curriculum.
Prasanna Premachandra, ICT Project Manager, MGGS
The biggest challenges we had managing our wireless network is providing coverage for all the different classrooms we had, different classrooms and different learning areas of various sizes. Some of them are very small, with about 15 to 20 students. Some of them are very large, about 60 plus students. So we had to have a solution where we can cover all of those areas without having multiple solutions running in the school. So previously, we had network dropouts, we had channel dropouts. But with Meru, we don’t have that problem because Meru uses a single channel. So the students can work all over the school without having dropouts.
Mary-Louise O’Brien, Director of eLearning, MGGS
Every student has access to a Toshiba Notebook, and staff all has access to a Toshiba tablet. We’re currently seeing an influx of other wireless connective devices, such as iPads, Kindles, Android Tablets.
Catherine Misson, Principal, Melbourne Girls Grammar School
Well our Director of eLearning tells me that we’re moving quickly to a BYOC, which is her shorthand for bring your own computer or computing device, and our job at the moment is to think big picture about that and to develop the sorts of guidelines and protocols which would allow our community to feel safe about that.
Mary-Louise O’Brien, Director of eLearning, MGGS
Well, it’s important for us that the student has a choice in the device that they bring to school and not only in the device but also in the tools they use. So we’ve already introduced a learning management system that hangs off the wireless network, and it’s given us confidence that that is there and it is the way of the future, and that girls will be able to bring in any device to connect to that network in the future.
Catherine Misson, Principal, Melbourne Girls Grammar School
We’re seeing lots of mobile devices in use, either those that we’ve provide or early adoption by our staff. So many of our staff involved in information literacy, for example, using a variety of e-readers, and I would have to say that every girl on campus has their own mobile phone, a smart phone, which they use hopefully in very effective ways to compliment the technology that we provide for them.
Mary-Louise O’Brien, Director of eLearning, MGGS
As we move to a BYO device environment, it’s really important that we can rely on the wireless network to support all the devices that will be introduced. So we’ll be using the Meru wireless network to support our vision for the future. .