Welcome!

Im Amy and I will be talking you through this por;on of the tutorial.
Were here today to learn about wireless networks. Were going to look at their
components as well as how they func;on.

Before we get started, lets take a look at one of the Interna;onal Society for
Technology in Educa;ons standards that will be met by this lesson.

Standard 3 encourages teachers to model digital age work and learning. Learning
about wireless networks does this and shows uency in technology systems that can
then be transferred to new technologies. Heres the screen shot of this standard
taken from the ISTE website. Since bring your own device days oJen lead to network
ques;ons, you will be able to turn these ques;ons into valuable teachable moments.

Ok, lets get started with the basic deni;on of a network.

Its just a connected group of people or things that share informa;on with each
other. A good example of this is your network of Facebook friends. Here on the right
you can see your friend network. Youre in the middle and your friends are
connected to you.

So whats a wireless computer network? It connects computers and your digital

devices through the air using radio waves. Wireless networks are commonly referred
to as wireless local area networks or just Wi-Fi.

While wireless networks can be set up many dierent ways, the basic components
remain the same. The heart of the network is the access point, and the links connect
it to the nodes. The graphic here illustrates this and starts building deni;ons for
these terms. You can see that nodes are your devices. Links are some kind of
connector and the access point, like yourself in your friend network, is the hub
direc;ng ac;vi;es.

Now lets build on these deni;ons by looking into how we connect in the air. Your
access point is a wireless router. It provides access to the internet and other
computers on the network. The router is actually wired to a modem that provides
internet access typically through Ethernet wires. From this point on, the network
becomes wireless. The links are radio waves instead of wires. They use one or two
bands of spectrum, 2.4 GHz or 5GHz. The 2.4 GHz spectrum is shared with
microwaves, baby monitors, garage door openers, and many other non-Wi-Fi devices.
All of these devices can cause interference to the network, but 2.4 GHz has a long
range compared to the 5GHz spectrum. The 5GHz spectrum is extremely less
crowded, but it has a shorter range requiring mul;ple access points. As for nodes,
theyre the computers and digital devices youre using. Laptops and desktops have
wireless network informa;on cards that receive and send data through radio waves,
and your mobile devices are like two-way radios that receive and transmit radio
waves to link to the access point.

Since we know the roles of the individual components, its simple to put them
together to understand how a wireless network func;ons. The access point or router
sends informa;on to and from the nodes or devices connected to the network using
radio waves or links.

One more ques;on you might be asking is how does the router know which node is
which? Your computers use something called Transmission Control Protocol/Internet
Protocol for this. TCP follows rules to create and assemble packets of informa;on
and IP sends and receives them. An IP address is assigned to your computer while in
a network. Its like your computer phone number

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So that sums up the basics of wireless networks. Who knew its as easy as an access
point linking nodes? You can explore networks further by asking your school tech to
show you the specics of your wireless network, and learn about the benets of
wireless networks in schools by con;nuing to step 3 of this tutorial. Thank you and
happy learning!

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