Wireless LAN lays the foundation for e-learning

Mentone Girls Grammar School (Mentone Girls) endeavours to give each girl an abiding passion for learning, to prepare her to become a confident, creative and articulate woman who has the skills, knowledge, values and attitudes to shape her future, lead with wisdom and compassion, and contribute meaningfully to the international community.

In 2008, Mentone Girls unveiled its ‘new WAVE’, a set of eight strategic ventures that will set the foundations to re-shape girls’ education for the 21st century. The employment of information technology has been a focus for Mentone Girls for many years.

Students receive specialised tuition from information technology teachers in an exciting program designed to help them make the best use of the technology that is available to them, from notebooks and computers to interactive whiteboards; from digital imaging equipment to extensive intranet resources.

Kay McCullough, Vice Principal and IT director at Mentone Girls, said, “This is a very exciting time for Mentone Girls Grammar. As we enter a new phase in technology and Web 2.0, students need the very best in technology to enhance their learning experience. We aim to make Mentone entirely and consistently wireless enabled in 2010.”

The 500 students and staff have a good number of PCs on the campus, connected by Cat 5 cables, and they also have just enough notebooks shared amongst them, regularly used in the science laboratory, and transported to other learning areas. As part of the government grant, Mentone Girls has ordered 60 more notebooks for students in Years 9 to 12, used across many areas in the Senior School.

McCullough said, “The main problem we had at Mentone Girls was that teachers and students did not have access to a steady wireless network. The complicated and outdated system deterred them from using the wireless network - classes were often frustrated with the weak connection. We needed a seamless, dependable wireless connection.

“To achieve the successful transition to an efficient, functioning e-learning school, Mentone Girls needed a suitable wireless network foundation that was easy to manage and expand, before fully investing in more mobile technologies.”

Based on a positive referral from another leading Melbourne school, Mentone Girls employed Wavelink Communications via one of Wavelink’s resellers, Leading Solutions, to implement a Meru Networks 802.11n wireless local area network (WLAN) in the science laboratory for a one-month trial.

After a successful pilot program, the teachers and students found the new wireless network consistently delivered a strong and stable network connection. After comparisons with wireless network solutions from other vendors, the Meru solution was found to be the most cost-efficient and best performing.

McCullough said, “The improved performance and ease of configuration has definitely made a huge difference to our daily school life. Meru Networks’ 802.11n WLAN solution met Mentone Girls’ wireless network and internet access requirements so well during the pilot phase that it was easy to imagine what Meru Networks could do for our girls’ e-learning environment, and for our plans to provide internet access across the entire school grounds.

Staff and students found Meru Networks’ 802.11n WLAN solution to be reliable in offering uninterrupted wireless internet access on a consistent basis. The school’s deployment of the Meru system has resulted in increased performance and improved connectivity, as well as a general boost in productivity for the students.

McCullough said, “Meru Networks’ wireless LAN gave us freedom from wires and opened up possibilities for learning. Now everyone is able to focus on the variety of resources online, instead of fumbling around with dropped connections.”

McCullough said, “The Meru WLAN solution gave our school an easy-to-implement, problem-free solution. The new Meru 802.11n infrastructure has much higher throughput and can support much higher densities of wireless users than previously - this means that we can plan for every student at our school to have access to the network.”