Here are some recent pictures of the delivery of HDX 7000 Polycom Video Conferencing systems to Walnut Grove Elementary School in Council Bluffs Iowa.

The mobile systems will be used to support point to point and multipoint full screen, full motion video conferencing between sites (depending on bandwidth, will support high definition video). The systems can be rolled in to any classroom and are ready for a video conference with anyone globally via the Internet in about 5 minutes.

For this project we will be delivering additional systems like these to multiple sites in the near future. Two of the additional sites are Lincoln Elementary in Waterloo Iowa and Price Lab School in Cedar Falls Iowa.

The systems at Walnut Grove are being used to support a Literacy project being hosted by the University of Northern Iowa. They will be used to auto record literacy teachers teaching in their classrooms using the Polycom HDX 7000 systems in combination with the RSS 4000 recording system, the RMX 2000 video bridge and the CMA 4000 management and desktop video conferencing solution. Many of these solutions were already deployed and being utilized at UNI, this project is building on resources already available to the UNI community.

Instructors and mentors will dial in to the classrooms in Council Bluffs using the remote camera control capabilities to pan, tilt and zoom the camera in the classroom focusing on the learning and teaching activities while auto recording on the RSS4000 for later review.

The recordings will be used later for examples and review of the lessons. The video conferencing systems will also be utilized for live conferencing after the class to discuss and assess the previous lessons as well as to conference with other peers nationally and possibly internationally in the future. The archived video will be distributed via a combination of ways, the RSS 4000, UNI Streaming Media Solution (http://live.uni.edu), UNI Learning Management System (http://www.uni.edu/elearning) and the Literacy Vimeo.com site (http://www.vimeo.com/unijccl).

This technology could also be used for bringing in guest speakers and to support other learning opportunities. It will be exciting to see other creative ways these solutions will be used by the innovative Iowa teachers in the future!

Here are some links if you are interested in parts of the project:

– University of Northern Iowa – http://www.uni.edu

– Richard O. Jacobson Center for Comprehensive Literacy – http://www.uni.edu/coe/special-programs/richard-o-jacobson-center-comprehensive-literacy

– Partnerships in Comprehensive Literacy – http://www.uni.edu/coe/pcl

– Polycom Video Products – http://www.polycom.com

– Rick Seeley – University of Northern Iowa – Manager, Instructional Technology Research and Development – 319.273.7218 – rick dot seeley@uni dot edu

uploaded via phone