September 14, 2011—Turkey Run and Rockville Community School Corporations in Indiana have a lot in common: their small size, their home county and their fierce athletic rivalry. This fall, they began to share something else. AP Physics and AP Calculus, over video-teleconferencing (VTC) technology from ENA.

Turkey Run Community School Corporation (IN) science teacher Susan Seitz teaches Physics to students in her own classroom and to two remote students in Rockville, IN, by way of ENA Video Connect. The video-teleconferencing solution enables Rockville Community School Corporation’s students to receive an AP course in an extremely cost-effective manner.

Combined, the two rural school systems have about 1500 K-12 students and three total school buildings, and they are located less than ten miles apart. Talk of a reorganization that would merge the two districts began a couple of years ago; that talk became formal recently and a board has been created to review and consider the issue. If the distance-learning classes are any indication, the two districts will probably get along just fine.

AP Calculus and AP Physics: Rockville needs it, Turkey Run’s got it

Rebecca Cory and Jana Crites, the technology directors of Turkey Run and Rockville, say their respective superintendents asked them over the summer to research a cost-effective means of broadcasting the two Turkey Run courses to Rockville. Rockville has two students interested in Physics and two interested in Calculus because their intended college major courses of study require it. Rockville doesn’t have the teacher resources to provide AP classes in these two subjects.

“One of our teachers is qualified to teach AP Physics,” explains Crites, “but we need him even more badly to teach math classes. You put personnel where it counts and, in our case, it still leaves us with a need. But it doesn’t fiscally make sense to hire a teacher for two students, no matter how much we would like to.”

Fortunately for the two directors (and the four Rockville students), a solution was easy to find. Crites heard about ENA Video Connect when an ENA representative introduced the cloud-based video-teleconferencing solution at a gathering of the Wabash Valley technology coordinators. The group, all of whom have similar network infrastructures and resources, meet quarterly “to discuss their challenges, brainstorm and bounce ideas off of one another,” explains Crites. Though inexpensive and uncomplicated, Crites was impressed with its secure transmission, its many features such as document sharing and the fact that up to eight individual participants can engage simultaneously in a single session. Soon after that, ENA Account Service Manager Tim Walker paid a visit to Crites and Cory to give them a more in-depth demonstration of the solution.

ENA Video Connect: “Economical … minimal equipment”

“ENA Video Connect is so economical,” says Cory. “It runs on the connectivity we already have. We only had to purchase minimal equipment—a camera and microphone-speaker.”

Both report that they are “very pleased” with their decision to go with ENA Video Connect and that the solution is “pretty simple,” “user-friendly”

Steve Stewart, a math teacher with the Turkey Run Community School Corporation (IN), instructs Calculus to students in his own classroom and to students in nearby Rockville Community School Corporation via ENA Video Connect.

and “very functional.” What minor complications Turkey Run has experienced, says Cory, is due to the extremely short amount of time the district had to find a solution and implement it. “One of our two teachers,” says Cory, “took to the solution very quickly and ran with it.” The other teacher, she says, isn’t quite as comfortable with technology and would have benefited from a little more time to train and practice teaching in front of both local students and via the camera to remote students. “But we’ve recruited a student to help with the setup each class and teacher is getting better at it,” she explains. “As far as the quality of broadcast, that’s been great.”

As for Rockville, since they are simply receiving the content, they’ve had no complications at all. “I set it up one night,” says Crites, who decided to utilize a single conference room and a dedicated laptop for the two classes (while the Turkey Run teachers and students remain in their regular classrooms), “and the next day I showed the students how it worked. There are proctors in the classes supervising, of course, but the solution is so easy the students just set it up and run it themselves each class.”

VTC wasn’t always so simple or so affordable

Distance learning was not always so simple in Rockville, according to Crites. In the past, the district had considered a distance-learning service offered by one of the state’s universities, “but it was not a live person, just a streaming recording, and plus it was expensive. We elected not to use it,” she says. Before that, the district did use another video-teleconferencing service that was extremely expensive and unwieldy. “It was several hundred dollars a month and required a room full of H.323 equipment and cords,” she says. “Our district subscribed for three years and didn’t use it more than 18 hours total.”

“My ENA Video Connect account works on a laptop and is twenty bucks a month,” Crites continues. “I can afford that all day long.”

Crites and Cory emphasize how easy it has been to work together. Crites appreciates the efforts of the Turkey Run teachers to make the Rockville students feel like a normal part of the class. Cory praises the Rockville Physics students for traveling to her corporation once a week for lab.

Get it all—curriculum, meetings, professional development—while going nowhere

On one hand, the district’s courteous cooperation comes as no surprise. Cory graduated from Rockville High School and had Crites as a teacher.

Rockville High School students follow a Physics lecture broadcast from another school district by way of video teleconferencing from ENA. Rockville cannot justify hiring a teacher for two students, so neighboring Turkey Run Community School Corporation has agreed to include the two remote students so that they get the much-needed credit for their college aspirations.

“I really love working with her,” says Cory. On the other hand, however, Cory says she would have never dreamed it would work so seamlessly. “We were evil rivals to one another when I was in school. Back then, I would have thought my skin would catch on fire if I walked into Turkey Run,” she jokes.

Fortunately for all of the epidermises of those involved, with ENA Video Connect, no one actually has to step foot anywhere. Convenient, cost-effective video teleconferencing that makes a critical difference in students’ lives—as well as in operational efficiency—is just some connectivity, a computer and a camera away!

 

 

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Contact ENA

For more information about ENA Video Connect, please contact ENA Technical Product Manager Mike Pfannenstiel at mpfannenstiel@ena.com.