Networking & Wireless | News

Miami-Dade County Expands 1-to-1 Program

• By Leila Meyer
• 06/26/14

Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS) has completed phase two of its 1-to-1 computing initiative, providing every student in elementary, seventh and ninth grades with Microsoft Windows 8 devices.

To support the increased number of mobile devices connecting to the district's WiFi network, Miami-Dade expanded its deployment of the Meru Education-Grade (MEG) WiFi solution and added Meru Identity Manager to automate network access for district-owned and guest devices. According to the company, the wireless network "currently supports about 150,000 students" and "when the rollout is complete, it will connect all 345,000 students and 40,000 teachers in 392 schools."

Students in Miami-Dade classrooms use their mobile devices to access educational applications on the network, including e-textbooks, Edmodo social learning platform, Discovery Education content and iMath. Faculty and staff use their devices to access administrative applications, including student information systems, financial applications, and systems for managing food services, transportation and facilities. The expanded wireless network is intended to provide increased bandwidth and density to support these applications as well as online assessments.

"Miami-Dade is providing students from very diverse backgrounds equal access to state-of-the-art technology for learning," said Sarosh Vesuna, vice president and general manager of Meru's business units, in a prepared statement.

Along with the MEG WiFi network and Meru Identity Manager, the district has deployed Meru E(z)RF Network Manager, which provides a Web-based interface for network-wide monitoring, end-to-end visibility and control of wireless deployments, as well as "access to real-time and historical performance metrics on each managed controller, access point and client," according to the company.