State of the Union — education promises best delivered via video

Written by kbest on February 4th, 2010

President Obama’s first State of the Union address focused on the expected hot topics of today, from job creation to healthcare reform. In addition, it also featured some aggressive thoughts about the current state of America’s education system, and ways it can be improved.

It’s no secret that America has slowly been losing its global edge in innovation, science, mathematics, engineering and technology over the years (STEM, which we’ve written about previously). Graduation rates have been much lower than expected in many regions of the country and schools have struggled to meet academic standards. According to his State of the Union address, President Obama is looking to stem this tide and turn around America’s schools by investing in reform and rewarding successful schools that embrace innovation.

The President is looking to renew the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and bring Race to the Top, a competitive grant program, to all 50 states. This program rewards schools that embrace innovation and work to increase student achievement and education in science, technology, engineering and math (known as STEM subjects).

For schools looking to be a part of this exciting competition, embrace innovation in the way they teach students and create excitement around STEM subjects, there are new technologies that can help get them there. A great example is video teleconferencing (VTC).

VTC technologies allow teachers to bring professionals, scientists, doctors and other experts directly to students to discuss how the lessons they are learning apply outside of the classroom. VTC also enables students to be virtually transported to far off places to see their lessons in action.

The economic benefits of VTC solutions are so important today. Schools can continue to provide a quality, rich educational experience to students even when additional funding and resources are unavailable.

By breaking down the walls between students, teachers and experts, VTC is bringing a richer educational experience to America’s children and STEM’ing the recessionary tide.

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Interoperability is the key

Written by MLawrence on February 2nd, 2010

Multiple recent events, from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina, have led government pundits and officials to call for better communication between government agencies. This increased collaboration is necessary to keep citizens safe, respond to disaster and emergency, and operate more effectively and efficiently.

Unfortunately, there’s a significant roadblock for increasing collaboration within and among agencies. As a rising number of agencies turn to video teleconferencing (VTC), instant messaging and other advanced and rapid forms of communication, converged voice and data networks are relied upon more than ever. This creates a problem for disparate agencies each relying on a different vendor for their network and communications infrastructure.

The key to enabling interagency collaboration and communication across these varied, disparate networks is interoperability. At TANDBERG, interoperability and firewall traversal are some of the most important features of our VTC solutions.

In fact, TANDBERG was first to deliver a telepresence solution that could interoperate with third-party systems, the first to enable high-definition video between Microsoft Office Communicator and multi-screen telepresence, and the first to deliver HD telepresence and video conferencing solutions that can interoperate with any other standards compliant systems. Interoperability is at the core of our VTC products.

The ability to enable face-to-face communication regardless of distance gives VTC solutions the ability to truly bring government agencies together and increase inter-agency communication and collaboration. When agencies are looking for VTC systems that will help them work more closely with other government organizations, the most important feature should always be true interoperability.

Helping the government better serve it’s constituents through collaboration and teamwork – now that’s a new way of governing.

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Giving a big apple to teachers in the Big Apple

Written by kbest on January 28th, 2010

With America’s school systems seeing decreases in gradation rates and the country losing its edge in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) subject knowledge to other countries, it’s evident change is needed.

The call to reform education has led to some very drastic measures being taken in cities across America. In New York, the Education Department has begun closing schools that are failing to meet standards. This move is going to cost a significant number of jobs and create hardships for students and parents whose schools are being affected.

Although the shuttering of large, failing schools in favor of smaller educational establishments has proven positive for graduation rates and other standards of evaluating academic performance, it’s not without negatives.

New York State is currently under significant budget constraints and cuts to New York City’s budget are already expected to cost 8,500 teachers and scores of other city employees their jobs. With the closing and reorganization of 19 schools, in conjunction with the other cuts being made to city personnel, the increase in unemployed citizens will invariably cause considerable strain on New York’s social services.

Video teleconferencing (VTC) solutions help improve underperforming schools VTC delivers not only experts, professionals and educational content, but allows high performing teachers and administrators to extend their reach to students across campus, across the state or around the world. With VTC, students access classes on other campuses, talk to experts about how everyday lessons relate to real life professions and occurrences, tour places they could previously not visit and see their lessons come to life.

With the ability to share resources through VTC, schools are able to offer the highest quality staff and a wide array of lessons and subjects to students in multiple locations. This allows schools to share the best teachers and even offer subjects that may have been cut for budget purposes such as the arts and foreign languages.

Closing schools may help to increase graduation rates and improve academic standards when looking at statistics, but there are significant costs to the community. Using VTC to break down the walls between students and a better education is a better way of teaching…and learning.

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What we have here is, a failure of preparedness

Written by admin on January 26th, 2010

The past 10 years have seen their fill of disasters, including terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and devastating earthquakes in Haiti this year. Impossible to predict and unpreventable, these events are examples of why disaster preparedness is so important. Crisis situations arise quickly and with little or no notice, and the speed of which we can provide necessary aid and assistance can often mean the difference between life and death.

Even with all these disasters, CNN reported today that a commission established to assess national security measures gave the U.S. government a failing grade in improving response time, especially response to biothreats. The commission found that despite improvements to identifying and preventing incidents, the past three administrations had failed to improve preparedness and response.

The failure to implement video teleconferencing (VTC) for delivery of healthcare during crisis situations is an incredible example of missed opportunities to improve disaster response.

Video teleconferencing (VTC) has seen rapid adoption in the healthcare arena as one way to deliver medical care quickly to those who need it. VTC has incredible potential in disaster response for increasing access to specialized health and medical services, enabling remote monitoring to control disease outbreaks and by providing back-up surge capacity for local healthcare providers.

Unfortunately, even with a wide array of implementation where VTC is helping to save lives and provide medical care to those in need, the wide-spread infrastructure and equipment investments and installations needed to bring VTC to mass disaster-relief operations have yet to be made. In fact, the American Telemedicine Association (ATA) has grown frustrated by the sheer amount of recommendations that they’ve made to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for use of VTC solutions in disaster recovery that have been ignored.

VTC solutions are capable of bringing care to victims of disasters. By enabling VTC in disaster response, the American government can break down the walls between skilled specialists and the victims who need care and empower a new way of responding.

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Break down the (great) walls: video connects government officials in Qinghai

Written by MLawrence on January 21st, 2010

We’ve talked extensively in the past about how video teleconferencing (VTC) technologies help government agencies and organizations run more effectively and efficiently. We’ve also discussed the ways that healthcare and education installations of VTC solutions help bring resources to remote and geographically isolated areas.

A recent article in FutureGov Magazine, which focuses on the modernization and use of new technologies in government, healthcare and education, contains an incredible example of VTC solutions making government work better and leveling the playing field for remote and geographically isolated regions.

The article discusses China’s largest province Qinghai, which stretches across the northeastern Tibetan Plateau. Despite its size, Qinghai is one of the least populated provinces, with approximately two-thirds of its 5.2 million people living in the countryside and outside of cities.

With a majority of people scattered amongst the region’s mountains, deserts and grasslands, the local government offices are spread out. Some district offices are up to 1000 kilometers from the provincial capital of Xi’ning. With inclement weather common in the province, travel for government officials is expensive and difficult, if not impossible.

Last year, a VTC network connecting 42 county government and 13 provincial party committee offices was installed. The network has already hosted more than 600 meetings, some of which were between more than 100,000 government officials in Qinghai at the same time.

The system has already saved an estimated $3 million in travel expenses alone. The VTC system has also allowed individuals who may never have met in person before to have face-to-face conversation.

By allowing government officials to collaborate and communicate regardless of the distance between them, VTC is ushering in a new way of working in China. How can VTC help your agency work better?

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Interoperability key for meeting federal mandates

Written by MLawrence on January 19th, 2010

The Obama administration is pushing agencies to begin insourcing jobs by bringing them back to government employees and relying less on outside vendors. The OMB is reaching out to agencies to help them appropriately understand and handle a directive that appears at face-value to be a complete about-face from the previous administration.

The administration is pushing for insourcing for many reasons. First, there is a perception, warranted or not, that outsourcing jobs is wasteful and expensive, and that agencies can be handling governmental tasks at a savings to the American taxpayer. Insourcing is also being heralded as a way of increasing collaboration among agencies and creating a tighter-knit and interconnected system where government employees work closely together.

However , there are some issues arising from this new directive for insourcing. One is the misinterpretation among agencies that they’re being asked to stop outsourcing altogether and bring all jobs in house. Another problem is directly tied to human resources and hiring. Insourcing will bring many jobs back to government agencies who are already missing tens of thousands employees in mission-critical positions, according to this year’s Where the Jobs Are report from the Partnership for Public Service.

The other problem lies in the directive for agencies to work closer together and collaborate across the board. Unfortunately, with agencies making their own purchasing decisions, the networks across agencies are disparate and disconnected. The video teleconferencing (VTC) systems that agencies have been turning to as a way to increase communication and collaboration internally could go a long way towards doing the same for interagency collaboration, but the lack of connected systems remain a roadblock.

This is why interoperability of VTC solutions is so important. Interoperability is essential for allowing disparate networks and VTC solutions to work together. Also, with cyber attack and network security on the minds of all agencies, firewalls and other security measures are often put in place with little to no consideration for video networks. This makes the ability to traverse firewalls essential for both network security and interagency collaboration.

VTC solutions are becoming increasingly popular in federal agencies, and with this directive to insource jobs, they will become even more essential. With the government already straining to fill mission-critical jobs at agencies, and with the government workforce graying and near retirement, flexibility and telework are going to continue to be job benefits necessary to keep aging government employees working and attracting the best talent into public service.

TANDBERG equipment has been the choice of many government agencies in large part for its ability to interoperate with other networks and equipment. By breaking down the walls between government agencies and giving them the means to increase flexibility and retain top talent, TANDBERG is providing a new way of working within the federal government.

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Teaching airmen over the airwaves

Written by MLawrence on January 14th, 2010

The TANDBERG team is currently in San Antonio, Texas, attending the Air Force Air Education and Training Command Symposium at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center.

Hosted by the Air Education Training Command (AETC), the symposium serves to educate senior leadership and airmen on the innovations, technologies and techniques available for training today’s Air Force. This is instrumental in the AETC’s mission of recruiting, training and educating all Air Force personnel worldwide.

In our conversations with some of the over 4,000 airmen and leaders in attendance, we continue to hear one major challenge facing the AETC today. With Air University, the Air Force Institute of Technology and the Air Force Academy all falling under the AETC’s umbrella, and a worldwide network of deployed airmen, officers and decision-makers, how can they bring the courses and training necessary to all of them in a more effective and efficient way?

In fact, with only a handful of expert instructors to serve thousands of potential students distributed across the globe, the cost of bringing students and instructors together was one of the single largest expenditures in the AETC’s budget.

This is why video teleconferencing (VTC) is becoming increasingly important to the AETC, and to professional development across government agencies and organizations today. By utilizing VTC solutions, the AETC can deliver the best knowledge and expertise to airmen, regardless of where they are.

This brings real-time, interactive training and educational content right to the student, significantly reducing the cost of mentoring and educating airmen in the field by taking away the need for travel. VTC also makes the most knowledgeable instructors more effective by expanding their reach and allowing them to mentor airmen thousands of miles away as if they were in the same room.

The mission of the United States Air Force is to fly, fight and win in air, space and cyberspace. Without proper training, mentoring and instruction, there’s no way that our nation’s airmen could remain the best in an increasingly dangerous world. By delivering instruction and educational content via video, the AETC is breaking down the walls between the most knowledgeable instructors and airmen around the world and empowering a new way of teaching.

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Video answers the call for healthcare access

Written by kbest on January 12th, 2010

Beneath political leanings, opinions on public options and discussions on whether the government should be involved in healthcare is a single, simple problem. Access. At the end of the day, can Americans receive the care they need, when they need it?

There are a handful of different roadblocks. The most obvious is the financial restriction. Even those who can afford insurance may face significant financial hardship from life’s broken limbs or chronic conditions.

Another roadblock is access. The logistics of getting to a specialist or doctor capable of treating a particular condition can be a challenge for many Americans.

This is particularly true of specialists such as neurologists or cardiologists. However, Video teleconferencing (VTC) is quickly becoming the answer for patients who may not have the access they want to the doctors they need. Through VTC, patients receive treatment regardless of where they are, and specialists in high demand see patients more quickly and efficiently, bringing the care that is needed to the patient who needs it, when they need it.

A great example of this is TANDBERG customer Specialist on Call (SOC), which recently delivered its 10,000th teleneurology consultation via VTC. Specialists On Call provides hospitals across the country with immediate, around-the-clock access to board certified neurologists via VTC.

Hospitals using SOC’s teleneurology service have been able to bring life-saving treatments to patients more quickly and efficiently than those not using the service. In fact, at hospitals using SOC’s service, the clot dissolving drug tPA has been delivered to 59% of patients presenting with Acute Ischemic Stroke within the 3-hour window. This is more than three times the national average delivery rate for hospitals treating similarly eligible stroke patients.

Specialists can help save lives, make chronic conditions more manageable and reduce the long-term effects of medical emergencies via video. By giving everyone access to quality care regardless of who they are or where they are, VTC is truly breaking down the walls between patients and doctors. Now that’s a new way of caring.

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Video lets students learn from students, who learn from doing

Written by kbest on January 8th, 2010

Education is constantly evolving. In fact, the modern classroom and learning environment has changed dramatically from the one that many of us grew up in. New teaching philosophies and techniques are constantly emerging and the days of a teacher standing at the front of a room of half-asleep pupils lecturing from a course book seem to be coming to an end.

What we’re starting to see instead are methods like the Montessori Method which embrace more interactive environments. The key thinking behind these methods is that students are naturally curious and hungry for learning and knowledge, and will seek and learn new things through interaction, self-directed projects and observation. In addition, many of these new methods call for putting students of varying ages together, and allowing older students to act as teachers or mentors to younger ones, creating a social environment where students can pass on what they’ve learned to others.

The adoption of video teleconferencing (VTC) solutions in the classroom has allowed educators to take these concepts of project-based, self-directed learning and students teaching students a step further. By utilizing VTC solutions, students can be tasked with creating presentations on a wide variety of topics and subjects and share. These projects empower students to explore, research and interact with a subject at their own pace and level, and then share what they’ve learned via video with students across the globe. In addition to learning about these topics and teaching others, the students receive an excellent education in using new technologies.

There are a handful of excellent and recent examples of VTC solutions being used in this way to teach students through the creation of their own content. One example was the first ever Project Astronomy Competition in New South Wales, Australia (NSW) by the NSW Department of Education and TANDBERG.

The Project Astronomy Competition corresponded with the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first use of the telescope, and challenged students to use their VTC facilities to develop a classroom presentation on Astronomy and share it within the region. The winner, a Year 9 class at Burwood Girls High School in NSW, used their creative skills in science, mathematics and technology to secure a $10,000 TANDBERG high definition video conferencing package for their school.

Another example is the Kids Creating Community Content (KC3) International Contest being conducted by the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration (CILC) and TANDBERG. The contest challenges students to create a dynamic videoconference program about their community to be offered to classrooms internationally. Not only does this contest help students learn about and look at their community in a new way, but also helps to spread knowledge of different geographies and cultures to students around the world. The completed projects are currently being displayed and judged, and the winners are expected to be announced in March.

By enabling the creation and international sharing of student content, VTC solutions are helping to educate and break down the walls separating students across the globe. Self-directed projects that help students learn and educate others around the world, now that’s a new way of teaching.

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Video keeps inmates behind bars, and citizens safe

Written by KWooten on January 5th, 2010

Greg Donell Benson, who was jailed on felony charges including assaulting a public servant, was in a Galveston, Texas, courtroom meeting with his lawyer on Dec. 30, 2009. During the meeting in which only Benson, his attorney and bailiffs were present, the inmate allegedly slipped out of his handcuffs and attacked his attorney.

On Wednesday, Dec. 9, 2009, Brian Lee Carter was in court to face charges of burglary of an auto, escape from a penal institution, aggravated burglary, vandalism and criminal trespass in Hamilton County, Tenn. When being brought back into the hallway by bailiffs, Carter dropped a homemade knife, raising concerns since he had previously been allowed to be alone in a small room with a public defender while unknowingly armed with a dangerous weapon.

These aren’t scenes from an action movie, pages from a horror story or even episodes of a courtroom drama. These situations really happened.

Fingers can be pointed in these circumstances. People may say the court security wasn’t tight enough, or that proper protocols weren’t followed. But there is one underlying question; why are we bringing dangerous criminals out of jails and putting them in situations where they can more easily hurt others or escape?

The adoption of video teleconferencing (VTC) solutions in the judicial system is an alternative to transporting inmates that can make courts safer. VTC solutions enable prisoners to appear in court and interact with judges and other court attendees as if they were in the same room, without them ever being transported outside of prison. This honors the due process rights of all defendants by providing clear visual and audio representation of all parties involved while eliminating the risk to citizens and public service personnel.

In addition to public safety, VTC solutions in courtroom settings can also go a long way in helping reduce expenses and save taxpayer dollars. Conducting court proceedings via video allows less money to be wasted on guards and transportation, and permits prosecutors to stay in one, centralized location instead of being spread across multiple courts. Also, with the Supreme Court recently ruling that all forensic and scientific experts be present during trials for cross examination, allowing testimony via video can save additional transportation and security dollars.

A great example of the benefits of VTC in the judicial system is the pilot program currently being run at the Holman Correctional Facility by the Alabama Department of Corrections. Despite only being implemented in some prisons and courtrooms through the pilot program, VTC solutions have been used by judges to hear multiple cases and have received praise on many levels. It is estimated that when fully implemented, the VTC solutions could save the state millions of dollars over time, and also help keep public servants and citizens safe.

VTC solutions in the courtroom and in prisons are revolutionizing the judicial system and making it safer, more efficient and more effective. Now that’s a new way of serving and protecting.

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