Skip to main content

Internet Bandwidth

 Greetings Prairie Hawks! 


As we've shared over the last 2 weeks, we're reaching our internet bandwidth cap that our firewall will allow us through during portions of days. He's a picture of our usage from the last week (notice the high usage on Wednesday, yesterday)


Yesterday, as you can see in the graph, the bandwidth was very high compared to previous days. We received reports that elementary teachers could not access the required FAST system for required progress monitoring.

We've tried a variety of mitigation strategies by blocking cell phones from connecting to our wireless network (Xirrus) in certain high use buildings, to blocking certain websites through our content web filter (iBoss) such as streaming media (Netflix, Disney Plus, etc). 

We do have a few requests at this time. Please limit the consumption of streaming video (YouTube). If you're showing a video for student learning, show it one time on your projector screen instead of having each student stream their own videos. 

If you are a user of GoGuardian, you'll know that we turned it off for a short period of time to examine its impact on the network. If you continue to use GoGuardian, please use it to limit student usage. We are seeing portions of the network strained hard when students are in studyhalls, or during unstructured times. 

Our current firewall is like a garden hose connected to a fire hydrant (Thanks Sam Ketchum for this analogy!). We are working with the vendor of our new firewall that was just recently purchased and pushing them to have full installation as soon as possible. This will make our connection larger to the Internet and allow for more traffic to move through. Until we get this implemented we ask that each user watch what they are doing (Think similar to saving the environment, if each person does a little it all adds up!)

We'll continue to monitor and will provide updates every few days. Thanks for your patience! 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Passwords - oh passwords!

 We just recently sent this message to our staff:  Greetings! In our continuing efforts to create a more technology secure environment, we are going to begin to enforce the following rules for STAFF passwords in Google. All passwords must be a minimum length of 12 characters. We recommend passwords that are passphrases, for example “ilovechipsandsalsa”. While we are enforcing a password length requirement, at this time we are not requiring complexity through special characters, or symbols, or upper case letters. All staff will be required to create a new password every 180 days. We will begin enforcing these policies on Wednesday November 16th. When you log into your Google account, you will be prompted to update your password. A few other items regarding this change. Infinite Campus passwords will not be affected. Teacher MacBook logins, office staff’s windows logins, any business office/HR logins, or other website logins will not be affected. Para tablets, chromebooks, or ot...
Post a Comment
Read more

Personal Device and Personal Accounts

  We have received some recent guidance regarding personal cell phone use from Matt Carver, Legal Council for School Administrators of Iowa that we felt would be beneficial to pass along to you. LINK TO ARTICLE (NOTE ARTICLE IS ON PAGE 4). Please know that although this article is directed toward school administrators, it applies to ALL school employees .  One key point that I want to reiterate is this paragraph below:  "Does this mean that all communications between school employees or representatives are subject to public records requests? NO. Again, consider if the communication is about official business. If the communication does not relate to the employee or board member carrying out their official duties or making a decision about the school district, a student, or another employee, then it is unlikely the communication is subject to a request. Remember that public employees have constitutionally protected rights to speak on matters of public concern in their pe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Webfilter update

  Just this week we implemented a new webfilter. Many of you use GoGuardian's teacher classroom management system so you would be familiar with that platform. We are now also using their content filter to ensure CIPA compliance for our network, on student and staff devices. In part of this implementation, you may have noticed some times of certain sites that were allowed in the past getting blocked now, or vice versa.   We will be continuing to monitor the filter and if things pop up that you or students need access to please reach out. 
Post a Comment
Read more