What is your district’s need? How many students don’t have internet at home? How many students have inadequate internet at home? Where are those homes?

Conduct a needs assessment to identify students and teachers without sufficient connectivity. 

Don’t forget to ask WHY they don’t have the access they need. These barriers can include: service is too expensive, service is unavailable at their location, family does not want connectivity.

Once you know where the students are and what the barriers are – you can start to identify potential solutions. Can these homes be connected using mobile Wi-Fi hotspots – or are they in areas without cellular service?

1. Determine if your school district has funding to support student and teacher connectivity.
   
   
   Did You Know?

   GEER and ESSER grant funding can be used for teacher and student connectivity
   
   GEER: Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund. Colorado received $44 million for grants to school districts, public schools, and public institutions of higher education serving high-needs students in order to help prevent and address the “COVID slide” and support innovation and equity.
   ESSER: Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund. Colorado received $120 million in emergency relief funds to address the impact that COVID-19 has had, and continues to have, on elementary and secondary schools.
   
   
   
2. Work with local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to provide high-speed internet to your students and teachers. Get started by asking the ISP: 
   
   1. Can they provide service to your students and teachers’ households (you may need to provide a list of addresses)? How long would it take to connect each household?
      
   2. Do they have existing discount programs or service plans to support distance learning? 
      
   3. Can they contract directly with the school district to provide bulk pricing devices?

Need more guidance? Here are a few resources to help you get started:

Visit the Colorado Department of Education “Getting Connected Online” page: www.cde.state.co.us/learningathome/gettingconnected

Check out the detailed “How to Connect Your Students: Home Internet Access” guide created by our partners at EducationSuperHighway

Upload speed is how quickly information travels from your device to the internet. For example, uploading pictures to an online album will be limited by the upload speed. If you have a 5 Mbps upload connection, it would take about 3 minutes to upload 20 pictures. A 1.5 Mbps upload connection would increase that time to over 8 minutes.

Download speed is how quickly information travels from the internet to your device and appears on the screen. For example, Netflix uses about 5 Mbps to stream a movie, so if your speeds are less than 5 Mbps, the movie will likely stop and buffer. 

Mbps: Internet connection speeds are typically measured in megabits per second (or “Mbps”).

If your service is not fast enough for the type of activity you are trying to do on the internet, you may experience dropped connections, buffering, or inability to complete your tasks. Imagine you just completed a homework assignment and you are unable to upload it in time to meet the deadline.

For interactive learning: two-way video calls requires upload and download at the same time, meaning you would need about 3 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload for a good connection. 

Internet data caps are monthly limits on the amount of data you can use over your internet connection. When you hit that limit, there can be a variety of consequences based on your service contract. This can include:

• Overage Fees
• Slowing down data speeds
• Disconnecting service

Data caps include both upload and download data. That means when you are doing an activity like video conferencing, you are are uploading and downloading simultaneously, and data from both upload and download gets added to you data usage number.

Caps are most common for mobile data service, but are also imposed by many “fixed” internet providers (meaning the connection to your home from the phone or cable company). Mobile data caps are often much lower than home internet services – think of 10 GB per month for mobile service versus 1000 GB per month for fixed service.

It’s important to know if you have a data cap and to know what happens when you reach it. Ask your Internet Service Provider or Mobile/Cellular carrier if your service contract includes data caps, and if so what will happen if your data usage exceeds the data cap?