教育工作者需要模拟数字鸿沟的百家乐软件

The digital divide is the opportunity gap suffered by low-income households that lack internet access. As more learning opportunities available outside of school move online—from supplemental textbook materials to performing classwork online at home during inclement weather days—the concern is that students across the digital divide will fall further behind their better-connected peers. This specific subcase of the digital divide is called the “homework gap.”

幸运的是，数字鸿沟继续缩小. 根据… 2017年NTIA调查 (国家电信和信息管理局), 74% of households with school-age children and annual household incomes less than $25K have internet service at home, 在相当可比的市场中，这一比例为65% 这项调查来自皮尤研究中心 2015年完成. A newer manifestation of the digital divide is that lower-income households tend to rely solely on tablets and smartphones for internet access. 无论好坏, 这种趋势的一部分是我们的责任, since these devices are integral for the creation and consumption of streaming media. The expected downside is that students bridging the digital divide will need interventions with written communication skills since tablets and smartphones lack keyboards. The good news is that those interventions are quite inexpensive: A decent Bluetooth keyboard can be had for $30. Many school districts are more aggressively intervening by adopting policies in which each student is issued an inexpensive computing device, 通常是谷歌Chromebook.

Regardless of how students source a computing device worthy for schoolwork, some of them won’t have an internet connection at home to use it on. 教师需要对这一点敏感, and staff who support the teachers need to maintain expertise in public internet availability within their community. 如果一个学生在家里不能上网, 教育者应该意识到学生们会在哪里寻找答案. 拥有强大社交网络的学生可以去朋友家. Higher-risk students who don’t have that option will either go to the nearest public library or to a business that both provides Wi-Fi and doesn’t feel threatened by the presence of teenagers who aren’t spending a lot of money. 在非常小的社区, the town McDonald’s may be the only option for the most vulnerable students.

Concerned educators and the professionals who support them should periodically check in on these places to make sure the internet service is of high enough quality to be usable for what the online classwork demands and that the evening shift management tolerates the presence of students. If you take representative measurements of the internet speed at these places, there are great tools available for simulating those conditions in order to test how gracefully an assignment degrades under impoverished network conditions.

现代课堂活动和视频最有可能是在浏览器中, using HTML5 technology that’s easy to inspect with the browser’s developer tools. Chrome and Firefox both have baked-in tools to throttle the bandwidth to any speed limit you want to evaluate. 你可以用这些来模拟任何网速, including the local Wi-Fi hotspot where the high school kids do homework or the local 3G networks for students whose home internet access is through mobile network towers.

如果需要模拟不良的网络连接进行安装, 独立的程序, 有很多选择. Since I first started working with adaptive bitrate streaming outside of a RealNetworks framework over a decade ago, I’ve relied on a tool for Windows called NetLimiter to simulate network conditions anticipated for or reported by end users. 值得注意的是，NetLimiter的成本与当初完全一样首先由 流媒体 in 2004这也是当前高中新生出生的年份. NetLimiter allows you to set a maximum network ingress or egress speed for any process running on your Windows computer. 在Mac电脑上，有一个类似的工具叫做Network Link conditioning.

[本文发表于2019年10月号。 流媒体杂志 “模拟数字鸿沟”."]

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