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Changing the Way Education is Delivered

When you see a group of students going to or coming from school, you almost always see backpacks full of books. You can't study or do homework without your textbook! However, soon you will see students carrying laptop bags instead. It seems difficult to believe, but school districts are starting to make the choice to provide students with laptops rather than textbooks. When considering the cost of producing multiple thick textbooks for each student every year they are in school, the laptop is actually the cheaper choice in the long run, and much more eco-friendly.

So what are the logistics of this plan? Do the students download copies of all of their textbooks to their laptops? That could take up a lot of hard drive space and require a good deal of memory and processing power to "flip" through the pages at a reasonable pace. A better solution is to have the textbooks available on the school district's intranet, which the students would access through a network connection. Now it's not feasible to have 20-30 network plugs in each class room, so the schools will have to have a wireless network for the laptops to access.

Wouldn't all of those simultaneous users eat up all the bandwidth and make the network run painfully slow? That's not an issue with the recent ratification of 802.11n, which allows 350 megabits per second compared to its predecessor, 802.11g, which ran at 54 megabits per second. All of that extra speed means that several users can be using the network at any given time, all while downloading data or music or streaming videos without any interruptions or, more importantly, delays.

Even adding in the cost of installation and support of a wireless infrastructure, school districts can still see how laptops will save them money over textbooks. Another added benefit is that the school district can now utilize the many teaching resources that are now available via the internet. 802.11n wireless technology is certainly opening up a world of new possibilities.