214 tip helps 116 with 1:1

Urbana School District 116, Illinois, has purchased a CACHEBOX solution to launch 1:1 at its 8 school sites without upgrading costly bandwidth.

Urbana prides itself on providing innovative, comprehensive education programmes that respect individual learning styles in their rich multicultural community. It recognised 1:1 learning as the next step in achieving its goals.

However, Christopher Fuller, Director of Instructional Technology at Urbana, was acutely aware that equipping 4,000 students with devices would cause serious strain on the district’s 500Mbps bandwidth connection. If content was to buffer or time-out, students would quickly lose focus and lesson time would be lost, directly impacting learning.

Luckily for Christopher, a like-minded Technology Director – Keith Bockwoldt from Township High School District 214 – shared with him how he had been able to dramatically reduce bandwidth usage, and significantly speed up content delivery with CACHEBOX.

With some friendly advice and useful information from ApplianSys, Urbana quickly made the decision to order 8 CACHEBOXes, one for each school.

“CACHEBOX puts content as close to students as possible, ensuring lightning-fast delivery,” said Brad Smith, Sales Specialist at ApplianSys. “Urbana’s new individualised learning programme has been successfully introduced – with no impact on existing infrastructure, or slow-down of internet access.”

About
Urbana (http://www.usd116.org/) is located in picturesque Champaign County, Illinois, about 140 miles south of Chicago. Urbana School District 116 is responsible for the town’s 4,000 students – including 6 elementary schools with over 300 students each, and a middle and high school with 800-1,000 students. With over 400 staff the district is a leading employer in the town.