Day 1 Talk Like a Techie: 20 Days VC Challenge

It’s time for the 3rd annual 20 Day Challenge on videoconferencing topics, written by Roxanne Glaser and Janine Lim!

This year we tackle the complicated and challenging area of the technical aspects of videoconferencing. In K12 education, it’s often hard to find someone with knowledge of how standards-based (H.323) videoconferencing interacts with the district network. This can cause quality issues that present a barrier to educators and teachers who want to use videoconferencing. So for the next 20 days of blog posts, we’ll be sharing some best practices and background knowledge of how videoconferencing works on your network.

Target Audience

Our target audience for this series includes:

  • Educational service agency personnel involved with videoconferencing
  • District technology coordinators and technicians involved with making videoconferencing work on the network
  • School level educators who need enough background knowledge to effectively communicate with network folks

Guest Blogger Shane Howard

We are joined this year, by award-winning multi-talented Super Bridge Dude, Shane Howard (who by the way has his own band!). Shane has many qualifications to contribute to this blog challenge:

  • supporting schools’ use of videoconferencing for over 13 years
  • expertise in working with school networks to optimize videoconferencing
  • also known as Rudolph and has appeared on screens as a school bus and a sun!
  • runs the SIG IVC Ops at the ISTE conference, making sure all the connections went smoothly.

Topics

During the course of the next 20 days, we’ll be discussing various topics that affect the educational experience of videoconferencing, including:

  • Definitions and background knowledge
  • Setting up your network for videoconferencing
  • Firewalls, firewall traversal units, gatekeepers
  • Dialing quirks and tips
  • Basic troubleshooting

Whether you are new to videoconferencing, or an old pro, we hope that this series of posts will help you improve your practice so that your teachers can be more successful in their use of videoconferencing.

Task

Your Turn

  • What do you find most technically challenging about videoconferencing?

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