Technology Transforming Education: St. John's Prep Implements New Wi-Fi Cloud Connectivity

St. John's Prep in Danvers, Mass. has chosen ADTRAN (News - Alert) Inc., a provider of cloud connectivity, enterprise communications and virtual mobility solutions, for its products and solutions that allow teachers and students to use the entire campus as a classroom, with Wi-Fi-enabled devices keeping everything connected and saving costs.

The school has implemented ADTRAN's virtual wireless LAN (vWLAN) solution with ADTRAN's Bluesocket (News - Alert) 1800 series 802.11n access points across its entire 175-acre campus, located 15 miles northeast of Boston.

St. John's Prep, a Xaverian-Brothers sponsored secondary school for young men, works to prepare all 1,200 students “to take full advantage of today's technology resources and encourages the use of Wi-Fi enabled devices in the curriculum,” according to a recent press statement.

The faculty also uses Web-based technology to teach students, and the school has launched ongoing digital learning initiatives that require a highly scalable, reliable Wi-Fi infrastructure. St. John's Prep turned to ADTRAN to help assemble the right solution for the campus, students and faculty.

Schools all over the country are realizing the value of technology-based studies. Many schools, like Christ the King Catholic High School in North Carolina, issue laptops to every student so they can begin to use technology as they learn, while T.C. Williams High School, in Virginia’s Alexandria City Public School system, uses technology to create online and blended-learning environments that provide extra support to students who need it to help them graduate.

Since 2000, hundreds of thousands of students have received personal computers to use as learning tools in school, including all middle school students in Maine, and soon, all high school students in Pennsylvania.

As teachers are learning everywhere, technology is transforming education. “The fact is that computers are beginning to transform schools into more effective institutions. As digital technology continues to increase in power and versatility, schools need a framework to help apply these tools productively,” wrote Andrew A. Zucker, author of “Transforming Schools with Technology: How Smart Use of Digital Tools Helps Achieve Six Key Education Goals.” 

At St. John's Prep's sprawling campus, “centralized user control and software-based, virtualized device management residing on a hypervisor” was exactly what ADTRAN could offer, according to the source.

“Rather than deploy a traditional hardware-based solution to operate its wireless network, vWLAN enables St. John's Prep to leverage virtualization to eliminate the operational constraints and costs of physical hardware WLAN controllers,” it continued.

Now St. John's Prep can create a private, secure cloud for the entire campus.

"We looked at other solutions, but all of them required additional hardware which added significant cost and operational burden to our IT staff's resources,” said Christopher Butler, director of information services at St. John's Prep. “Since ADTRAN's vWLAN solution is certified as VMware Ready, the installation of the vWLAN software on to our VMware instance was quick and effortless. In the end, we achieved significant savings by avoiding all costs and bottlenecks associated with a hardware-based controller solution and gained a future-proof network with immense scalability to address growing demand on our network."