The wireless Internet connection for the seventh-grade hall has been restored, following the replacement of a faulty switch.
Following the Chromebook rollout last week, the Wi-Fi connection in the seventh-grade hall has been out of service since Friday. However, as of 10 a.m. today, the wireless connection is restored.
Teachers were notified of a faulty switch that needed to be replaced before the Wi-fi connection could be restored. Initially, teachers were told by the school district’s Technology Department that Wi-Fi could take up to a week to be restored. An update Tuesday updated the timeline to this afternoon.
The lack of Wi-Fi connection caused some difficulties for some teachers on the seventh-grade hall. Instead of pushing assignments out through Google Classroom, teachers to be more reliant on paper.
“(It’s been) terrible,” Stacy Pena, seventh-grade science teacher, said about the outage. “It’s awful and putting things on hold.”
Pena, whose classroom in on the interior of Duncan Middle School, said the lack of Wi-Fi didn’t just impact student work, but it caused a disconnect with teacher communication.
Duncan Middle School teachers and staff used the GroupMe app to keep in connection to one another. But with the lack of Wi-Fi, teachers with interior rooms had no way to send or receive message via GroupMe. Without windows for data usage and a lack of Wi-Fi, teachers had no way to interact with the GroupMe app on their phones.
Other apps teachers and students use include communication platforms, including ThrillShare and Gmail, both of which can be access on the teacher computers. These computers are hard-lined into the Internet, which the lack of Wi-Fi does not affect.
Pena said the Internet situation has been stressful for teachers and students.
“I’m stressed and need to send communication out,” she said prior to the Wi-Fi connection being restored.
