Best in class

We have around 700 video units across [NSW] DET and by the time we're finished we expect to have 5000. It's by far the largest videoconferencing network in the world.

Part two of the Connected Classroom saw us given $63 million over four years to increase the speed and reliability of our wide area network. We have 97 per cent of schools going into this on a 2Mbps synchronous link. We are a year into that project and hope the minimum a school will have is 10Mbps; some will be on 100Mbps. The $63 million will be used to purchase fibre, and the delivery of that fibre to premises across the state. We are way ahead of other states and have just signed a deal to have 1640 [school] sites up to 10Mbps by the end of 2009. A 10Mbps scalable fibre connection is much faster than you would think - it's like having a dedicated line all to yourself and much quicker than having ADSL2+, for example, as a home user. It wasn't all that long ago when local area networks were 10Mbps.

The third part of the Connected Classroom is that we have $28 million to implement a learning tools project. As part of that we had to go out and replace our email system because time had run out on the contract extensions we had with Unisys. We recently announced Google was the successful bidder and we are going with Gmail for 1.3 million students, which will be the largest email network for Google in the world.

We're also going to develop what we call an e-backpack, which is a virtual storage space for every person on our network where they can receive files and post their work back into teachers. That will be an 'in the cloud' storage solution for all of our students. We really have to upgrade our network capacity before we can bring that online.

We're also going to introduce a lot of Web 2.0 collaboration tools such as wikis, blogs and forums, underpinned with an identity management and grouping system that will allow us to self-provision classes, teachers and other groups of people with similar interests. Instead of registering on Internet sites and giving them their email address, we'll keep all of that within DET and have a learning repository where teachers create lessons and can swap them with each other for use on the interactive whiteboards. Kids can post video in a secure environment that's authenticated so they don't have to be out on the wild, wild Internet.

So that's the Connected Classroom. It's quite ambitious but we already have a portal that has about 200,000 logons a day, which is significantly bigger than any other organisation within Australia including all of the major banks. We run that technology out of our datacentre in St Leonards.

When you put all of that together I think a lot of people, myself included, would be surprised at how far along you are in delivering technology to the classroom.

SW: We are certainly advanced in our design, I think, and are pushing the boundaries of what technology can deliver. All of those things, coupled with the increase in density of devices we are seeing, is going to see the traffic on the network and applications that are used grow significantly.

I heard David Thodey [Telstra's group managing director of enterprise and government] recently saying that in 2000 the monthly Internet traffic for all of Australia was about 1.5TB. At the moment, we [DET] are consuming about 30TB of data from the Internet every month, which makes us the largest consumer of Internet traffic in Australia.

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

• Bookmark this page
• Share this article
  •  
  • facebook
  • slashdot
  • digg
  • Reddit
  • stumbleupon
  • linkedin
  • twitter
• Got more on this story? Email CIO
• Follow CIO on twitter

• Share
  Share this article1

  •  google+
  • facebookfacebook
  • slashdotslashdot
  • diggdigg
  • RedditReddit
  • stumbleuponstumbleupon
  • linkedinlinkedin
  • twittertwitter
• print
• email
• Bookmark