Green = IVC Hybrid

Several presenters from South Central Kansas Education Service Center are doing a session on videoconferencing at TxDLA. Kay Highbarger, Executive Director is doing the presentation.

They have 4 teachers on staff, including one from China who teaches full length Chinese classes as well as short Chinese culture programs.

50 daily classes daily high school over their network

Also special topics – Chinces, Spanish and Careers for middle and high school students.

Audra May, the tech support, has a PVX in her office to do test calls and connect classes.

“windshield time” is getting cut, VC is a solution for staff development. Districts don’t come in any more for training, “we will go to them”.

Early Literacy Discovery Time with Mrs. Goose is a very popular program they offer. She told the story about a class in Texas that sang happy birthday to her in the session. “Texans are just great!” It’s not just us in Michigan that love to connect to Texas!

They are working to show their schools that “are too good” to need distance learning services to help them realize their students can benefit from these full length courses as well.

They have a really cool 3D thing, but all their equipment didn’t come. They have pictures of how they put these 3D objects in both sites and it’s 3D right in the middle of you. It’s hard to visualize and know what they mean without actually seeing it. Can’t find any info on it on their website either.

The sender manipulates the object, but the receiver can’t manipulate it. They can also put the object on the server so all the classes can get it. That’s how Bill Baker described it. He’s at Navigator Development. It’s HD plus 3D. I know I’m not describing it well but linked to what I could find by Googling. It can also work with 3D glasses. Bill’s company creates content for schools as they ask for it – and then you own the content. You could then sell it to other places if you want. There are about 100 of these applications (brain, ATV, etc.) made and they are building them all the time. Another person said that you can import other 3D content – and there are thousands of those too. For example the content on Turbo Squid. They are working towards putting in this $100,000 ish room plus setting up one of their staff to create 3D content. It would be only at the education service center but not at the districts – because they are receiving it.

In addition to doing programming for schools, they reach out to the community, community colleges, higher ed, senior centers, etc.

They are the first service center for their state doing HD – they have Polycom HD carts in their schools and really enjoy it.

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