Regional Ed Tech Specialists Rely on eduroam for Wi-Fi

Utah education staff, faculty and students benefit from eduroam, a unique service that allows them to connect to Wi-Fi networks in locations around the world.

Jeremiah Moore had his Wi-Fi ready to go when he attended a college football game in Florida. He hadn’t coordinated with a tech team there or gotten on guest Wi-Fi. He just walked onto the campus and his eduroam connection clicked into place.

eduroam is a worldwide system that provides access to local Wi-Fi networks as long as you have a valid eduroam ID. In Utah, nearly every teacher and staff member of a K-12 school as well as every student, faculty member and staff member of a higher education institution has access to this service.

Moore is a Regional Support Specialist for the Southeast Education Service Center, a Utah agency that provides support to schools throughout the rural southeast portion of the state. His job takes him through the four districts in that area—Carbon, Emery, Grand and San Juan—and eduroam gives him Wi-Fi access in all those places.

"I don't know what it would be like to not have it," Moore said, since his office had been set up with eduroam before he started. "We use it for our day to day needs; it’s our new way of doing things."

eduroam is especially helpful for employees who travel extensively for their jobs, like Moore. It also benefits district superintendents, teacher trainers and others. Moore raves about the flexibility of eduroam and ticks off the conferences where he has used it in the past year: URSA, UCET, the UEN Tech Summit and SAINTCon.

UEN has been at the forefront of eduroam efforts in the state. B.J. Peterson, Regional Network Engineer for Central Utah Educational Services (CUES), explained that the reason Utah has so many more eduroam connections than anywhere else in the country is that UEN championed the adoption of eduroam among K-12 schools, whereas most eduroam programs have focused on serving higher education institutions only.

Like Moore, Peterson uses eduroam when he travels throughout the CUES service area, which includes seven school districts. In fact, right now nearly every member of school faculty and staff can access eduroam throughout the state. But CUES has been helping South Sanpete School District pilot a program that expands eduroam access to students, allowing them to access Wi-Fi when they travel for sports or activities.

This pilot presents a particular challenge—eduroam does not have any built-in filtering tools, so in order to filter students’ content as required by law, the team had to come up with another solution. They solved the problem by using hardware-based filtering on devices issued to the students by their schools. Students can keep up on classwork and homework while traveling by using these school-issued devices and eduroam.

Moore noted that he is the envy of administrators he knows in other states. "Without eduroam, we would not have many of the capabilities we have," he said.

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