Aerohive TeacherView
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Aerohive TeacherView
Making teachers's live as easy as one click
e-learning is e-asy?
Computers offer the promise of educating students in innovative and unique ways, while exposing them early on to the high-tech that they will likely build upon throughout their lives. It is thus no surprise that computers are appearing in more and more schools.
There are, however, a number of issues which must be addressed for laptop learning to be successful. Setting aside the major challenge of developing appropriate curricula that include this use of the laptop, the challenges with an e-learning program include:
- Technical issues - Teachers are forced into the role of IT/network administrators; a role for which they are often unprepared. Enabling a classroom of students to log into their computers and get connected to the network can be extremely daunting to a non-technical instructor. Not only can these issues hijack class time, they can erode the teacher's credibility.
- Distractions - With any network connected computer there are innumerable distractions for students. Video and audio noise can inhibit concentration, while the temptation of unrestricted Internet access can draw students away from the task at hand.
- Teacher visibility - Given the lure of the Internet, teachers must be able to ensure that the laptop is being used as assigned/intended. The screen of a laptop faces the wrong way for a teacher to see what students are doing, forcing teachers to roam the classroom to view student screens.
Visibility & Control
With laptops in a classroom teachers are at a disadvantage when trying to see what a student is doing. With books, a teacher can glance around the classroom to confirm that the right book is out and that it is open. With a laptop screen pointed towards the student, and in most cases away from the teacher, this isn't possible -the laptop could be off, or the student could be doing something other than the lesson. This issue requires that teachers spend a significant period of the class walking up and down aisles of desks checking in on what students are doing on their laptops.
To improve this, some schools have looked at tablets as a solution, where the screen is at least flat to the table. This certainly helps, but the viewing angles of screens are such that the teacher still needs to walk around the classroom to see what content is being viewed.
TeacherView enables the teacher to focus on teaching by providing the status of an entire classroom at a glance. The interface easily shows which students are connected, the quality of their connection and it can provide more specific information about the resources students are accessing if the teacher wants to see it. This easy-to-understand interface allows the teacher to quickly ensure that students are on task without distracting from the flow of a lesson.
TeacherView leverages Aerohive access points in a classroom to provide teachers a network-based, client independent (laptop, iPad, iPhone...), OS independent (Windows, Android, iOS, Linux...) student monitoring and access control system through a simpleto-use web interface. TeacherView provides status to the teacher at login, without requiring any configuration. This enables teachers to log-in and view what is happening on student's laptops without consuming class time walking up and down aisles of desks
Student access led by the teacher
Getting visibility is an invaluable first step toward a successful e-learning program. The next step is using that information to manage connectivity and resources accessed. This can be difficult even to a technical instructor, but TeacherView makes it simple with guided, wizard-like instructions that illustrate how to use the tool to keep students on task and enforce a lesson plan. The action panes on the TeacherView provide tools to the teacher that control the network access of the students.
The "Allow Access To" pane enables the instructor to shut down access to the Internet, the school network or all networks. The teacher may want to prevent access to the Internet due to distractions, or may want to shut down network access all together to encourage the students to pay attention to the lesson. On the Access Point, this interface dynamically enables or disables firewall rules controlling access to the network. Students' laptops are still connected to the HiveAP but unpermitted packets are not allowed through. These dynamic rules only affect students in the class and can be turned off when network access is desired or at the end of the class period. The teacher does not need to do any configuration at all.
The "Direct Students to a Web Page" dialog box is a very powerful solution that enables the teacher to push the students to a specific website. When the website URL is entered into the dialog box, the next time the students refresh their browser or try to go to any other website they will be automatically redirected to the website the teacher entered. This is particularly useful for very long or complex URLs that are troublesome to enter manually.
Management
Since teachers have varied levels of technical capability, making TeacherView easy to work with is critical to ensure that it is used. To that end, TeacherView requires no configuration by the instructor at all. When the teacher logs in, they simply choose their class, and then they will immediately be presented with a screen showing the associated clients and their status as well as the options to control the access to the Internet and the school network. This easy setup is enabled via a set of back-end administration tools that allow the network admin to create teacher accounts, set up class schedules and group wireless clients into classes. Identification of the students is done based upon the client they use or on the login they used. It is thus possible to control both shool-owned clients as well as the student-owned clients.
