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wow Portage High School • PORTAGE, IN Vol. 76 • Issue 7 • December 18, 2015
HOLIDAY HIJINX PHS students debate the “best of” everything related to the holidays amid beginning winter activities PAGE 3 Photo by Alex Stack
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International Migrant Day recognizes plight of immigrants and refugees
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McDonald’s debuts mozerella sticks at $1.39 for three sticks
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Students balance Cheerleading and Gymanstics
NEW YEAR, NEW TECHNOLOGY
Drew offers updates on Wi-Fi speeds, new telephone system, 3D printers
By now, technological Nick Blue updates have Editor-In-Chief • @clarinotist become a normal part of a PTS student’s life; even though the 1:1 initiative is getting into full swing and wireless access points have been added to every PHS classroom, the whirlwind of new technology has not passed yet. In the coming months, students can expect to experience faster Internet speeds and even see an increase in school phone call quality, according to Director of IT Jay Drew. The changes come with the continuing effort to improve the school system’s general technological system and to make it the most beneficial to students. Drew said that, first and foremost, by the end of the month the amount of wireless Internet bandwidth available to the school system will be increased from one half a gigabyte to a full two gigabytes, which should drastically increase
Internet speeds for students and teachers. Drew said that some apps, such as Snapchat and Instagram, have been blocked in order to save the bandwidth for educational functions, such as Schoology use. “We had to save bandwidth for our key instructional uses,” Drew said. “Another part of the blocking is that a lot of students were totally abusing Snapchat and some other social media. [It is not] an instructional need and it was beyond recreational.” However, once the new influx of bandwidth comes at the end of the month, the social media apps that have not been blocked should experience increased performance. “Once we get opened up, what we can do with the network is we can say that social media [can occupy] ten percent of the bandwidth, so if we have a gigabyte and we’re only using half of that, nobody will see an issue,” Drew said. “[Right now] we have a half of a gigabyte and we are using that half, so we aren’t worried about providing good quality service to Snapchat as opposed to things like
Schoology.” In terms of bandwidth usage, Drew says that the priority absolutely goes to educational functions over social media and other apps and websites. In addition to upping the bandwidth for the school district, the number of access points, which offer localized faster Internet speeds, at various schools will be increased as well. “Last summer we upgraded the high school’s and middle schools’ to the latest wireless access points to be ready for 1:1. This year we’ll upgrade all of our elementary buildings with the same level of access points, and then we’ll be filling in some holes at the high school and middles schools, like places at the commons at East where there is one access point that can effectively handle 90 clients and we end up with 300 plus clients on that one access point. That causes us a little bit of a problem when people are trying to do stuff online.” In addition to improving the amount of
bandwidth available to the school district, the phone system will also see some upgrades and changes. Drew said that three years ago when the current telephone technology was adopted the system was cloud based, which caused call quality to suffer greatly. “Our contract is up with that, so we had to bid for something regardless, and we’re looking at bringing [the hardware] in to resolve some call quality issues we’ve had,” Drew said. New district-wide tech features aside, unique additions to the high school include two 3D printers, which are on display in a display area near the commons. Drew said that the printers are part of a new initiative to develop Project-Based Learning among engineering students. “It was something the school board and the superintendent were really keen on moving forward with, developing what’s called a makerspace,” Drew said. “This is the first stage of it.