GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

As New York City plans to spend more on technology consultants and expand its online learning programs, an obstacle is presenting itself: schools aren’t as wired as people assumed.

At a panel discussion today about online learning — orchestrated by the city’s Department of Education and the Federal Communications Commission — Wireless Generation CEO Larry Berger talked about the challenges software developers face when they work in public schools. Some schools have the bandwidth to support classrooms where each student has her own laptop. Others can barely give their teachers wireless access.

Asked about some of the problems classroom technology poses, Berger said:

I think one of the hard things is that it’s almost never the case that you get to work in a school that has all of the infrastructure that you wish it had. What we start learning as we try to do initiatives that assume that kids would be on a computer, connected, and learning at their own pace, is that we learned that the schools we thought were wired aren’t that wired. (more…)