School/District Results
Professional educators, whose comments appear below, have discovered a variety of reasons schools and districts benefit from the use of videoconferencing.
Connecting with needed professional expertise:
School staff are in touch with specialists in medical, psychological, and other areas, including special assistance with technical or facility problems.
Providing more staff development opportunities:
Access to a wide range staff development opportunities is possible without leaving the district, and without regard to distance.
Closer interagency communication:
Contact with SEA, law enforcement, or other agency staff can be convenient and timely.
Saving travel cost and time:
These savings are realized in all three of the factors above.
Improved curricular offerings:
Small and rural districts which have difficulty providing a broad set of curricular offerings are enabled to meet the needs of their students.
Scott Buswell Manager of Technology, Montana Office of Public Instruction, Helena, MT, Kate Stetzner Superintendent, Butte, MT and Detlef Johl Elementary Teacher, Kessler Elementary School, Helena, MT.
Leland Dishman Superintendent, North Slope Borough School District, AK.
Comments from practitioners:
Scott Buswell, Manager of Technology, on professional interaction at a distance: "One thing I've noticed over the past several years in working with the video system, you can't get a good feeling for how some one really feels about an issue just over the phone. You can pick up a few clues through intonation of voice but body language means so much more. When I see someone on the video system and their arms are folded and you know they've got the quizzical look, that means a lot to me. It just adds a whole other dimension to the conversation."
Detlef Johl, Elementary Teacher, on sustaining job interest:
"Bringing video into the classroom, whether it is a video camera or as in this case using the technology of video and computers, has added another dimension to my teaching. It brings into my teaching a whole new excitement of what to do. When I used a video camera for the first time, it was great. We were able to see results; we were able to view them later. Now, we are not only able to do an experiment as we are doing, but we are able to share it with another classroom, and we are also able to tape it at the same time for us to view later. What this does is give us a whole new way to look at what we are doing. It has made my teaching, for myself, much more interesting."
Kate Stetzner, Superintendent, discusses professional interaction and the formation of problem-oriented teams to address major issues:
"I think technology will give us a real opportunity to make our schools safer. One of the things that we know, and we have modeled that at this school, is that [it is important] to allow classroom teachers to visit with school safety policy makers. As policy makers are putting together policies, they need to have a practical aspect to their theory, so they need a classroom teacher who says, 'That is not going to work in this classroom of third graders. It might look good on paper but these kids are not going to understand this.' So via that [videoconferencing] system, we're not paying the expense of sending our teachers to those policy makers and vice versa. "Another implication is there is such an opportunity for classroom teachers to visit with other classroom teachers across the country or superintendents to visit with other superintendents, administrators, etc., to talk about what you are doing at your school, how you are practicing your safety drills. What kinds of information do you have that we could sit down and put together a workshop? Then, using the shared notebook component, actually design an agenda for a workshop on school safety issues by being able to visit model sites and [discuss] what has and hasn't worked in a situation. You've had a school shooting, how have you dealt with those issues of cooperation and how are you making the school safer? "Finally, the third issue is that I truly believe that classroom teachers and law enforcement officers and probation officers and department of family service workers will all become a team. As we establish site-based school safety teams, we need to be able to have two-way conferencing where we're going to be able to make sure the kids don't leave the educational setting, but they take care of the issues that are outside issues. We have alternative services and services provided for them at the school, because we're here to make them productive members of society and when they leave we may not see them for a while."
Leland Dishman, Superintendent, addresses meeting goals and improving staff development and interaction:
"One of the earlier goals of this school district was to deliver quality education and an equal type of education in all of our rural schools, our village schools. The board of education made a determination that the best way to do this was through the use of compressed video. By putting together the compressed video project, they enabled us to offer advanced math, art classes, web class development, and a great deal of other courses to our village schools that would not be available unless we have something like compressed video or a network system in place. And it has greatly expanded, and met many of the goals for this school district. "I think some of the most successful uses of videoconferencing have been in our inservice [activities]. We have approximately 230 certified employees, and we do a great deal of in-servicing. Our special education inservice much of the time is held by compressed video. A lot of our maintenance and operations, new materials, new ideas that need to be disseminated across the entire district, we do by compressed video."