Distance Training Gets Better: Interactive Whiteboards Plus Video

Travelling to teacher training classes subtracts from productivity and adds to a schools/ college’s carbon footprint.

Now, the growing availability of video endpoints in educational establishments means teachers and staff don’t necessarily need to travel for training. “Increasingly, teachers are joining live training sessions over the network, using PCs, IP phones, or high-end telepresence systems,” says Scott Aukema, Cisco’s telepresence architecture manager for the public sector.

Even interactive whiteboards can serve as video endpoints, with the necessary tools. Then remote participants see everything the trainer displays or writes on the whiteboard as if they were in the same room as the trainier.

I See What You See

Suppose a new teacher named Sarah is hired and needs training on school security policies. Just before class begins, she can log in to the video collaboration session from her desk, a conference room, training room, or telepresence room.

When class begins, the instructor initiates the video call, and Sarah and her fellow trainees in all locations see and greet each other. Then the trainer starts sharing the desktop of a PC connected to the whiteboard to show a presentation, diagram, image, webpage, form, or anything else. As Sarah watches her display, she sees as the trainer annotates the diagram appearing on the interactive whiteboard. The trainer might circle an area on a facilities map and draw an arrow pointing to a critical location.

Keeping Perspective

Until recently, the in-person experience broke down after the trainer made the presentation or video window larger or smaller. “Then the annotations no longer aligned with the image and did not change size proportionately with the image,” Aukema explains. “As a result, a circle the instructor drew on part of a diagram might no longer be around the item of interest.” This was distracting, shifting people’s focus to the technology instead of the training content.

The solution is Cisco® Synch technology, which works with Cisco devices used to display live video on the whiteboard (Figure 1). Trainers can freely add video calls from multiple locations to their interactive whiteboard training sessions, and rearrange and resize the presentation and video however they’d like. “You can repeatedly move and resize the PC image display, and all your markups will move with it, retaining the right size and position relative to the image,” says Kerry Best, manager for public sector telepresence at Cisco. “Combining interactive whiteboards with video helps trainers keep remote participants engaged, making it practical for schools or local authorities, to offer more types of training at a distance.”

To watch a video showing Cisco Synch in action, visit: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A4imn7SzY8 To read more about Cisco Synch, visit: http://www.tandberg.com/interactive-whiteboards-video-conferencing-synch.jsp

To find out more about Synch and SWOT-NET you can reach us here http://www.swotnet.co.uk/contact/