iPads using thousands of Internet Connections

I work for a public school system and our firewall is reporting random iPads have 7,000+ connections to Amazon servers. We determined that the connections were not to Amazon.com, but to websites that appeared to be hosted on Amazon servers. The problem became so bad that it crashed our 100MB Internet connection. This does not appear to be a virus, and the students were not going to inappropriate websites - our firewall would block that if they were.

So, we worked with our ISP to limit iPad Internet connections to 150. Our Internet connection is not crashing, but now when an iPad reaches 150 connections, the student cannot browse any webpages or check e-mail with the Apple mail app. We've tried everything from closing Safari and other apps, to rebooting the iPad, but the only way we can fix the problem is to break the connections at the firewall, or turn the iPad off and try it again later in the day or the next day. We thought we had this narrowed down to the Edmodo app, but we have now noticed it on iPads that do not have that app and were only being used to browse the Internet and check e-mail when the problem occurred.

Our ISP has not seen this, and neither has Apple Support. Has anyone here seen a similar problem?