Industry News
USDLA Board Members Join GPA
National Park's Distance Learning Initiative Supports Virtual Field Trips
Kramer Unveils New Wireless Education Solution at InfoComm Connections in New York City
When the Musical Chairs are all Gone, Which AV Integrators Will Be Left Standing?
Julie Young and Pam Birtolo have embarked on a new adventure - serving students with innovative educational opportunities. Julie is the United States Distance Learning Association (USDLA) Board Chair Emirata and Pam is a current USDLA Board Member. The two have joined the team at Global Personalized Academics (GPA), which provides virtual and classroom learning solutions to schools around the world. The GPA organization was formed by the acquisition of Blended Schools Network (BSN). Ms. Young and Ms. Birtolo will work with BSN co-founder Jed Friedrichsen to support kindergarten through 12th grade students in the U.S., while also expanding opportunities for international students through the organization's U.S. diploma program. For more information on their roles and on the role of the GPA, please visit GPAed.com.
National Park's Distance Learning Initiative Supports Virtual Field Trips
Mission: Inspiration and education is the key to preserving both the idea of national parks and the park resources themselves.
Background: With lesson plans based on national curriculum standards to professional development opportunities to college-level historic preservation courses, the National Park Service (NPS) has the tools, the technology, and the stories.
The National Park Service (NPS) distance learning programs take students on a virtual field trip where they can talk directly to a Ranger and be taken behind the scenes of a national park to hear the stories of America’s diverse places and people. The stories are found across the natural and historic landscapes of our nation in more than 400 national parks, in National Heritage Areas, along historic trails and waterways, on hollow ground, and in every neighborhood. The NPS invites educators and students to discover their American heritage and history in all its diversity, from ancient archeological places to the homes of poets and Presidents to the sobering stories of Civil War soldiers and civilians to the legacy of a courageous women who refused to give up her seat on a bus.
Challenge: To make the NPS stories come alive and to make them interactive for educators and students in the classroom. The more than 400 park units are set in diverse locations ranging from remote and rural to historic and eco-sensitive landscapes, and that presents huge technical hurdles in terms of deploying and utilizing telecommunication, advance digital technology, and at times even electrical power while protecting and preserving the NPS park units.
Over the past year, the NPS Northeast Region has been at the epicenter of historic events. Jim McGettigan and his team successfully planned and produced several major special distance learning events. Those events included the Star-Spangled Banner Bicentennial at Fort McHenry from on board the Pride of Baltimore in the harbor, and inside the 1812 star fort. The experience from Fort McHenry was then utilized to broadcast two six-hour-long distance learning and live stream virtual outreach programs that supported the culmination of the Civil War Sesquicentennial event at Appomattox Court House NHS, a historic village frozen in an 1865 time setting. The Appomattox event required staging a carefully planned temporary 4G cellular tower, 4G routers, customized Polycom systems, mobile smart devices, cameras, and “green and low noise” electrical power generators.
Kramer Unveils New Wireless Education Solution at InfoComm Connections in New York City
Kramer has released a wireless VIA solution for Education and Training at InfoComm Connections 2015. VIA Campus, the newest addition to the VIA family of wireless presentation and collaboration solutions and based on direct input from experts in higher education, enhances student engagement in classrooms and multi−use corporate training rooms. With any laptop or mobile device, students can connect and present instantly to the main display, view the main display on their screen, edit documents together in real time, and use the main display as a digital whiteboard. Both teachers and students can share any size file and stream smooth full−frame HD video.
The solution’s e-polling and e-exam features help teachers easily and instantly measure how much students are actually learning. With e-exams, teachers can give interactive, multi−media tests and get immediate feedback. E-Polling lets teachers conduct instant surveys of student knowledge and opinion to help stimulate relevant and lively discussion and debate. This Bring−Your−Own−Device (BYOD) solution also features full on−screen collaboration, seamless Mac/PC and iOS/Android mirroring, and third-party apps for remote learning and collaboration.
“We believe VIA Campus will transform the training experience, helping customers engage their students better and create a more efficient and satisfying learning environment,” said Neta Lempert, VP Digital Business Development at Kramer.
When the Musical Chairs are all Gone, Which AV Integrators Will Be Left Standing?
Pat Cassella
President, ETC Video
The days of AV integration are once again changing rapidly and seats are being gobbled up in this latest round of musical chairs. In this new world of AV cloud computing, traditional integrators are having to redefine themselves and embrace service-based offerings or face possible extinction. For those of us who’ve been in the industry for several decades, we’ve all seen this cycle before. I remember the last transformation like it was yesterday. The decision of whether an AV integrator should add networking options and whether a network integrator should get smart about AV integration. It was the classic “Hey, you got your chocolate in my peanut butter. No, you got your peanut butter in my chocolate” debate. Disclaimer: Google “peanut butter in my chocolate” and watch the YouTube clip if you don’t get that one.
Traditional AV integrators knew little (if any) about IP networking and network-centric integrators thought AV was anti-virus software. Today those lines are intersected and IP-based audio-video systems are about as common as Miley Cyrus on TMZ. Today we’re seeing the same dilemma in the AV integration market except it has a new twist – the cloud. Integrators accustomed to providing on-site AV services need to adapt to the changing world of the cloud or face possible extinction.
Take video conferencing for instance. Not long ago, your options for infrastructure location were fairly limited. Most customers built-out dedicated video conferencing rooms for distance learning, board meetings, depositions, etc. The bridges were either part of the endpoints or dedicated iron in the customer’s on-premise data center. Today it’s not so simple; dedicated rooms for video conferencing are being replaced with huddle rooms and BYOD (bring your own device) powered by a cloud-based service for management, bridging, recording, and more. Deployment architectures can be on-premise (private cloud) in an off-site data center (public cloud) or a hybrid solution, which uses a bit of each deployment strategy. In any case, the AV integrator is expected to know the benefits and trade-offs of each option.
Integrators are rapidly rolling out their own cloud services, either through specialty software on a set of commercial servers (think Amazon Web Services or IBM’s SoftLayer) or through their own leased space in a data center. What does this mean for the customer? Customers in turn have also had to re-think their deployment strategies and sort through a seemingly endless supply of communication options. However, regardless of which direction you head, it’s nice to have options, and options generally mean more competition for the integrators and lower costs for the customer. The shakeout has begun and it will be interesting to see who will remain standing when the game of musical chairs finishes this go-around.
