SWOT Net and Cisco: Extending the Classroom Outside the Walls

The old classroom staples of chalk and slate have formidable competition from electronic whiteboards. Teachers are embracing these whiteboards to enliven classroom learning by displaying and annotating digital content, such as applications and programs, maps, diagrams, or webpages. “Instead of having to stand near their PCs, teachers can stand at the front of the class as they do normally, and control the application or computer by touching the electronic whiteboard,” says Kerry Best, manager for public sector telepresence at Cisco.

Now campuses with networks designed to carry video calls can use their interactive whiteboards as telepresence and video endpoints, extending the classroom beyond the physical walls. “Students on U.K. campuses can see their peers in India, or take a virtual field trip anywhere in the world,” says Scott Aukema, Cisco’s telepresence architecture manager for the public sector.

Keeping Perspective

The good news is that teachers can now more easily combine presentations and video on the same interactive whiteboard. The experience used to break down if the teacher 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. 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 students’ focus to the technology instead of the content,” Aukema says.
The solution is Cisco Synch® technology, which works with Cisco devices used to display live video on the whiteboard (Figure 1). With Cisco Synch, teachers and instructors can freely add video calls from multiple locations to their interactive whiteboard training sessions, and rearrange and resize the presentation and video how ever 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 Best. “Combining interactive whiteboards with video helps teacherss engage students and visually interact with people anywhere in the world.”
For more details on the solution please contact the SWOT team by using this link
http://www.swotnet.co.uk/contact/