Bandwidth – Maximizing and Troubleshooting

Bandwidth – Maximizing and Troubleshooting

As we move toward a week of at-home learning for all students in Alberta at the start of January 2021, we are offering this tutorial to try to help families maximize the capacity of their home internet connection without incurring additional costs to the internet service providers. There are many things that can be done for free to try to improve the Google Meet experience.

This video will give an analogy for the internet and bandwidth and then take you through some ideas to improve your home connection.

Summary

  • Move closer to your router. Try to attain 3 bars.
  • Do a speed test of your download & upload speeds.
  • When possible, download content the night before it is needed (especially video content).
  • Enable offline mode for GSuite (Google Docs, Slides, Sheets).
  • Powercycle your router.
  • Set Google Meet’s layout to “spotlight” (and don’t use blur/change background).
  • Remove household cell phones from the wifi, or turn them off.

 

The CESD Online Field Trip Form

The CESD Online Field Trip Form

It’s been lagging for some people. This could be the result of a few different things.

1. Too many tabs open – if you have 10-kajillion tabs open, things will slow down. (Google Keep is a great place to store websites that you don’t want to lose track of – just a tip there – as a teacher I often had many tabs open… stuff I’d discovered while searching for something else but didn’t want to lose…)

2. The download folder of your Chromebook could be full. Especially if you use Teachers Pay Teachers to buy resources. If you do that, download them, copy them into your Google Drive, then remove them from the downloads folder!

3. Your browser history (cache for those of you who are more my age category) may need to be cleared. To do that, click the 3 dots up at the top right of your screen (Where your profile photo is) and choose history. You’ll be taken to a screen such as . the image attached to this commentary. On the top left you can clear the browsing history.

So, in general, the usual things that can slow a computer down could be impacting your Chromebook. Test out the above three things if you’ve been having challenges with the field trip form!