How student mobile broadband is changing the way students study.
A great number of students spend quite a bit of time on the bus traveling to and from school each year. In fact, the American School Bus Council reports that 55% of all students travel to and from school on buses, making a staggering 26 million students riding buses per year. With some students spending up to 90 minutes a day commuting, it adds up to students spending 520 million school days going back and forth on buses each year. That’s a lot of time spent just sitting and doing nothing – or worse, getting into trouble.
How can educators ensure these kids are making the most of their commute time? One way is to extend the classroom to the school bus with Wi-Fi connectivity. To accomplish this, Synovia has partnered with Kajeet in order to offer our clients the ability to provide their students a “rolling study hall.”
Now, students can continue to do their schoolwork on the bus. With online connectivity they can safely learn, study, and even collaborate with other students on their assignments. Not only does this benefit the students by allowing them the opportunity to continue to learn while in transit, but it also helps to keep students occupied with things other than causing disturbances or getting in trouble, which means drivers can concentrate on the road rather than unruly kids.
But knowing that “kids will be kids,” what happens if instead of schoolwork, they’re visiting sites they’re not supposed to? Not to worry. With Kajeet, each bus can have 4G LTE connectivity preconfigured with safe CIPA compliant/education-content filters to keep students focused on schoolwork and to eliminate distractions. All of the routers are controlled in the cloud, so there is no need to create a private network back to the district. There are also time-of-day management and access controls, so schools can control when the network is in use and which URLs students are allowed to access.
As more and more school assignments and learning programs are becoming digital, this trend benefits students immensely – especially those who have limited or no access to broadband internet at home. Roughly seven in ten teachers assign homework requiring internet access, but according to the Federal Communications Commission, up to one third of students lack home access. Student mobile broadband helps to mitigate this issue and helps level the playing field.
Wi-fi on buses is a great way to keep kids occupied during a busy bus ride to and from school. You may want to consider this trend for your school, and provide a way to improve your students’ productivity and overall academic achievement while keeping the bus ride as uneventful as possible.
To learn more about our partnership with Kajeet and GPS tracking solutions, download your free copy of our magazine, Ridealong with Synovia Solutions. We'll help you stay on top of the latest fleet management trends, and decide what's right for your team.
