As districts work to close the Homework Gap, each district has its own strategy based on free-and-reduced-cost lunch numbers, geographic size and culture. For districts that are providing Wi-Fi on school buses or paying for student connectivity at home, we know the investment is important for administrators to quantify.
Kajeet is more than just Internet. While our solution may seem like just a Wi-Fi hotspot (or Wi-Fi on the school bus), Education Broadband™ provides filtering and metrics to help justify a district's technology program and show return on investment.
We recently added a new feature to our Kajeet Sentinel® cloud platform that gives faculty, users and/or administrators a one-page summary of how their technology investment is used (or not used) outside the classroom.
“Our customers’ time is valuable – which is why we have created these dashboards,” said Kajeet CEO and Founder Daniel Neal. “Having such tools allows high-level visibility into how students are using their Education Broadband data.”
Homework Hours: Program Accountability
Each time an educator logs in, he or she can see the total number of homework hours their students spent online in the time period selected, as well as the average per day, per active device and per day per active device. Insight into when devices are being used, by hour of the day and day of the week.
Allowed Domains vs. Denied Domains
What if you knew the websites your students were visiting?
With the new dashboard feature, users can see the ratio of allowed vs. denied domains, the top educational websites, top 20 allowed domains and the top 20 denied domains.
As a teacher, instructional technologist or curriculum director there are benefits to knowing what websites students are visiting on school-issued devices at home, especially if your district is providing the broadband to do so. It may help you to draw correlations between online activity outside the classroom and student achievement, gather instant feedback of what sites engage students or monitor whether students are actually going to sites that are recommended.
Device Usage
It’s helpful to know how many school Wi-Fi hotspot (better known at the Kajeet SmartSpot®) devices are in use. If all devices are in use all the time, perhaps more are needed. Perhaps this presents an opportunity for librarians, media specialists, IT coordinators or teachers to provide feedback on the continual demand for SmartSpots. (This may be an opportunity to expand and reach more students.) If devices are not in use, educators can find ways to publicize internally to students, families or re-purpose those SmartSpots for additional programs.
