As second quarter of Pine View’s school year moves forward, there have already been several instances in which the network connection has been lost for hours at a time. The learning and teaching environment at Pine View have both been affected by the outages because of teachers not being able to follow their lesson plan.
These Wi-Fi outages have been unrelated to Sarasota County, but was caused by the cable and power company that cut a fiber optic. Unfortunately, the technological support team had no control over these outages and could not contribute to fixing the connection. “The administration group was very informative and kept us updated of the progress with fixing the problem. This really helped a lot with communication and made the process go much smoother,” Hugo Guardado-Henriquez, Pine View’s technology support, said.
Some classrooms have not felt the effect of the outages, while others have been greatly impacted. Some high school students have not noticed any fluctuations. “I didn’t know the Wi-Fi went out until the end of the day when my friends told me. I was very surprised to hear that some people were immensely affected,” ninth-grader Caroline Creevy said.
On the other hand, many elementary students and teachers have had inconveniences due to the network. The elementary classrooms use Activboards and school computers daily, which rely on an internet connection to function. The faulty connection has caused many teachers’ lessons to be disrupted. Fifth-grade teacher Peggy Barber’s English and science classes utilize Office 365 for presentations often, all requiring wireless connection. “One of the days when the network was down, my language arts students were supposed to be presenting their group PowerPoints and couldn’t access them online,” Barber said. “This caused a lot of angst and put us behind schedule. All three of my science classes were supposed to be working on their labs that day, which also put us behind schedule and worried my students.”
Second-grade teacher Joann Hershberger said the Wi-Fi fluctuations also affected her lesson plans. “It definitely hinders our teaching, but it also hinders the students because modern technology has become part of our daily life and school essentially evolves around it nowadays. When things happen, like the Wi-Fi going out, it seems as if we have to go back to the Stone Ages,” she said.