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Cisco Public Sector Collaboration Brochure | © 2010 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.

Schools

“If we want to maintain a capacity for innovation in this country, we have to train our people to be scientific and technological leaders who can understand and solve complex problems. You can’t educate scientists and engineers without having exposure to technology.”

—Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson, President, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Meeting the Needs of Next-Generation Learners

Education is at a turning point. Students and their parents are demanding more access, more accountability, and more engagement. Government is demanding better results. And societies are looking for new learning models to improve global competitiveness.

• The world is changing: We now live in a highly competitive global economy in which almost everything and everyone is interconnected. Information technology underpins nearly every industry and its presence is not likely to diminish in the future. To effectively compete in this increasingly digital world, students must learn to use the tools that are essential to everyday life and the workplace.

• Technology is changing: Ubiquitous access and constant connectivity have become part of today’s social fabric. Rich media, including video, can be easily created and shared on cell phones, iPods, and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Schools must apply these new mediums to learning if education is to become more effective, more engaging, and more relevant.

• Students are changing: Technology plays a critical role in the lives of most students who increasingly question traditional learning methods. It’s no longer enough for teachers

to stand at the head of the class and lecture. A collaborative, technology-enhanced classroom is a core requirement to develop the critical thinking and modern skills that will allow students to survive and thrive in the 21st century.

These and other social, technological, and economic challenges require new and innovative approaches to education. To successfully prepare today’s students for tomorrow’s world, next-generation classrooms must reflect our increasingly global and interconnected society. The use of collaborative technology in the learning environment matters immensely in this endeavor.

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Create a Collaborative Learning Environment

Empower Faculty, Staff, Students, and Parents with Instant Conferencing

Empower Parents and Students to Connect with Teachers and Administrators

Empower Communities with Web 2.0 for Education

Empower People to Communicate Efficiently and Effectively

Empower Your School with Advanced Messaging

Empower Mobile Workers

Empower Teachers and Learners with TelePresence

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SchoolsCreate a Collaborative Learning Environment

Technology-enhanced collaboration is an excellent way to engage students and expand learning opportunities. It can also enable administrative and operational efficiencies. Cisco Collaboration provides the advanced solutions needed for next-generation learning. Cisco’s network-powered collaboration can help you engage students with new, collaborative learning methods that prepare them for life and work in the 21st century.

Technology-enhanced collaboration can have a positive impact on a wide variety of activities between both internal and external audiences. Everything from fundraising to recruiting, planning, scheduling, and events can be improved across a

range of people and departments. For example:

• Students can instantly collaborate with classmates on projects, regardless of location, and effectively interact with teachers for guidance and feedback.

• Teachers can work more effectively with other teachers to develop and refine course content. They can easily collaborate with other institutions, effectively communicate with students, parents, and administration, and stay better informed in the event of emergencies.

• Administration and staff can accelerate communications between departments, expand

the campus community beyond the brick and mortar campus, and keep faculty, students, and staff informed in the event of emergencies.

• Parents and community can have near-real-time access to information on student progress, be better informed about campus events and issues, and get instant notification about emergencies.

With Cisco Collaboration, schools can:

• Deliver media-rich learning experiences that more closely mirror the way students absorb information, interact with others, and use technology in their everyday lives

• Accommodate evolving student-centric learning styles with 24-hour online data, audio, and video libraries created by teachers and students

• Enable the spontaneous creation of teams so students can explore ideas, solve problems, and learn from one another by working together whether they’re on or off campus

• Create dynamic working environments that enable teachers and students to share expertise and ideas—quickly and easily, anytime and anywhere

• Reach beyond the brick and mortar school walls so students and teachers can connect, communicate, and collaborate with experts and peers around the world

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Schools • Higher-quality education: Because multiple

schools have access to subject matter experts and teachers, Turkey can use these precious resources more effectively.

“We wanted to show that ICT in schools could go beyond computer labs—it’s much more about the human network of students and teachers who can collaborate in a new type of learning environment.”—Dr. Fatos Yarman, president, EDMER (E-Government Research and Application Center, Turkey)

It’s time for your virtual lesson: Education is a key factor in Turkey’s national e-transformation initiative and participation in the European Union (EU). The government launched a national Digital Education initiative a few years ago to increase Turkey’s well-educated workforce. A Research and Application Center showcased a virtual classroom. The connected classroom was designed to provide equal access to individuals with different geographic and socioeconomic conditions through virtual classroom collaboration.

Teacher-to-teacher, teacher-to-student, and student-to-student collaboration— within the classroom and between schools—motivates teachers and students alike. Interactive, student-centric lessons raise awareness of technology, build technology competence, and improve student performance. Teachers are efficiently and cost-effectively trained online and curriculum is easily shared between schools. Benefits for Turkey will include:

• Reduced transportation costs: With virtual lessons, the cost of managing a fleet of buses to transfer students from rural villages to central schools is greatly reduced.

• Increased productivity: By eliminating time spent on transporting pupils to classes where a teacher is available, everyone saves time.

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SchoolsWhen schools use the network as a platform for collaborative learning, the same Cisco Collaboration solutions can also be used to increase administrative and operational efficiencies. With Cisco Collaboration schools can:

• Improve productivity and reduce travel-related costs for meetings and training by enabling teachers to have more “face-to-face” meetings with peers, staff, students, and parents over the network

• Streamline communications among faculty, administrators, students and parents by eliminating the bottlenecks to productivity with real-time collaborative capabilities such as presence, instant messaging, and online meetings

• Better leverage skills, talent, and knowledge within your school or district by giving experts the collaborative tools they need to be in two or more places at once

• Build communities to share information and best practices and enable teachers to increase their knowledge, interact with and learn from peers around the world

• Create an online repository of recordings, resources, links and tools that can be easily shared with other teachers

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SchoolsEmpower Faculty, Staff, Students, and Parents with Instant Conferencing

Cisco Collaboration provides a full suite of conferencing capabilities, which includes Cisco WebEx™ Meeting Center, Event Center, Training Center, and Support Center. These best-in-class conferencing solutions can be flexibly used to address the collaborative needs of your entire school, making it possible for you to deliver:

• Innovative education. The Cisco WebEx Collaboration Cloud enables distance learning curriculum, access to specialty teachers, student communities, and virtual study teams, so schools can create new and novel ways to educate beyond the current curriculum and geographic boundaries.

• Enhanced recruitment and retention. As expectations rise, schools need to attract and retain students and teachers with more connected, media-rich learning experiences. WebEx is proven, cutting-edge technology that enables real-time, secure collaboration among students and faculty.

• Research collaboration. Learning institutions need to be able to collaborate with institutions worldwide. WebEx allows schools to reach out internationally to collaborate with peers and educational leaders.

Cisco WebEx Connect provides core collaboration

services such as presence, instant messaging, shared workspaces, and voice, video, and web meetings. Cisco WebEx Connect streamlines faculty, staff, student, and parent communications and collaboration and provides a platform for students to experience continuous, collaborative learning. Many institutions experience rapid return on investment (ROI) with WebEx, getting an ROI within a few months of deployment. A rich set of features enable users to:

• Instantly see if someone is available using presence

• Engage in impromptu conversations with teachers, students, parents, staff, and external constituents using instant messaging

• Launch voice, video, and web meetings from instant messaging sessions

• Manage projects and team activities with integrated calendaring

• Share content and collaborate on projects with shared team spaces that provide a centralized location for shared documents and discussion threads

By shortening the time and reducing the effort of getting people together, schools can streamline processes, accelerate projects, and improve decision making. This is true for all users. And all you need to join a Cisco WebEx meeting is a browser and an Internet connection.

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Schools

More than 70 percent of the students who attend Sabio Academy in Chicago access courses from remote computers using WebEx. As a result, Sabio has attracted world-class talent from around the world, doubling its number of students while hiring remote faculty members who are passionate about teaching in a collaborative online environment.

Cisco on Cisco: Using its own WebEx collaboration tools, standard audio-video conferencing, and Cisco TelePresence conferencing, Cisco has virtually eliminated travel for internal meetings, reducing it by 99 percent. Cisco has also reduced training-related travel by 98 percent. As a result, travel expenses are down by more than half—from approximately US$750 million per year to approximately $350 million per year. Increased productivity from senior and executive management and other experts is valued at $42 million.

“WebEx makes it possible for me to watch students work out problems right in front of me. There’s no way I could engage with students on that level if I were standing in front of them in a traditional classroom.”—James Choi, Director of Mathematics, Sabio Academy

MyeAcademy in California is an SAT Prep Academy. It uses Cisco WebEx tools to reach students beyond the local area it serves by supplementing onsite courses with live online classes. MyeAcademy actually improved instruction with WebEx through increased interactivity, customization, and instant analysis of test results. Thanks to WebEx, MyeAcademy has increased its teaching capacity by 200 percent, doubling class size while improving instruction quality. The Academy received “highly satisfied” ratings from 95 percent of online students and is poised to expand instruction into language training.

“We knew our teaching methods were working. Cisco WebEx Advanced Services showed us how we could make them work even better by helping us bring them online with Cisco WebEx Training Center.”—Mindy Sun Li, President, MyeAcademy

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SchoolsEmpower Parents and Students to Connect with Teachers and Administrators

Cisco customer care products can help you proactively connect people with the information, expertise, and support they need, when and where they need it. These advanced products provide intelligent routing and call treatment, so you can transform customer care from simple phone transactions to rich interactions that can be customized to meet the needs of parents, students, faculty and staff using voice, web, email, and video. With Cisco customer care, schools can:

• Increase responsiveness while decreasing costs by enabling service agents to be more efficient and productive and by utilizing voice self-service functionality

• Virtualize knowledgeable staff and contact center applications to make sure people are connected to the right person regardless of where that person is located

• Provide personalized 24-hour services for faculty, staff, students, and parents

• Utilize automated speech recognition and text-to-speech capabilities to respond to parents, staff, and faculty in new and innovative ways

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SchoolsEmpower Communities with Web 2.0 for Education

Today’s students are accustomed to a range of social networking technologies. Increasingly, faculty members, administrators, and researchers are collaborating with these technologies as well. You can enable social-driven collaboration inside and outside of your organization with Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform (ECP.) It allows virtual teams and communities to:

• Quickly share ideas through blogs and wikis

• Schedule meetings and enable instant messaging, voice, and video communication

• Manage and share documents

• Take advantage of micro-blogging, content rating, and tagging to work more efficiently

Cisco ECP gives teams and knowledge workers a quick, highly secure way to create, share, and scale content and expertise within your organization. Built as an open, standards-based platform, Cisco ECP integrates vital communications and collaboration tools with everyday business applications into a single interface that is easy to use and customize.

It’s personal. It’s efficient. It’s everywhere!

Twenty hours of new content is uploaded to YouTube every minute. The typical employee now watches 4.6 hours of enterprise video each month, according to a 2009 report from IDC. It’s not a matter of if video will make its way into your organization, but when.

If you’d like to share ideas and expertise with user-generated video content, the Cisco Show and Share social video system can help you do it. Users can create content with the touch of a single button, quickly edit videos with a network-based video editor, tag videos with keywords to facilitate search functionality, and viewers can easily rate content and add comments to add value. Now video can be everywhere.

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SchoolsEmpower People to Communicate Efficiently and Effectively

IP communications—putting separate voice, video, and data onto a single IP network—can provide immediate reductions in the cost of communications. According to a 2008 survey by industry analyst, Chadwick Martin Bailey, with converged communications:

• 36 percent of organizations surveyed save 11−25 percent monthly from cell phone and long distance avoidance with mobile unified communications.

• 64 percent of organizations reduced annual travel costs by up to 25 percent through technology-enhanced collaboration.

• And 19 percent of organizations report a 26−50 percent reduction in monthly telecom charges as a result of upgrading to next-generation technology in their contact centers.

cards and student attendance.

More importantly, when you put voice on your data network, you lay a foundation for powerful new unified communications capabilities, which can give individuals up to two hours of more productive work every day. With Cisco Unified Communications you can start small and cost-effectively deploy unified communications where you need it most. You’ll reduce costs, improve worker productivity, and free up funds to invest in other areas.

The Collaboration Effect

You can obtain up to two hours of more productive work from employees every day, by extending unified communications across your organization.—Chadwick Martin Bailey

To Switch or not to Switch

If you haven’t switched to unified communications because you think it is cheaper to maintain a fully depreciated TDM infrastructure, think again. The vast majority of public sector organizations realize net savings of US$595 per user within five years, according to a Salire Partners UC TCO analysis of public and private organizations. Even if your aging telephony equipment is not fully depreciated, you’ll still be better off switching, because you’ll save on communications infrastructure costs, while creating a platform that enables future productivity and collaboration enhancements.

Township High School District 214 saved over US$400,000 when it converged voice, video, and data onto a single network. Its new infrastructure eliminated the cost of a separate telephone network and its IP phones are network appliances that can run productivity-building applications such as time

When St. Savior’s School in Ikoyi, Lagos, unified its communications, its goals were to improve communications between the main office and classrooms and improve responsiveness to emergency situations. With Cisco Unified Communications, St. Savior’s School:

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Schools • Enables more effective collaboration between

students and staff, which has improved learning and productivity

• Keeps teachers informed about issues and incidents anywhere in the school

• Greatly enhances the school’s ability to respond to emergencies by using the IP phones, which are in every classroom

• Quickly notifies parents and guardians regarding absenteeism, security issues, and other events that affect their child’s safety

“Our pupils have embraced the technology enthusiastically and with ease. The staff is elated by the wealth of learning that digital access has brought into the classroom, and how it has extended the learning experience beyond the classroom.”—Mrs. Geraldine Donnellan, ICT Director, St. Savior’s School

Complemented by solutions from Cisco partners, Cisco Unified Communications can be used to improve safety and security in your school. For example:

• Horizon Charter School in California uses Cisco Unified Communications for emergency notifications. The school has Cisco Unified IP Phones in every classroom and office. School-wide broadcasts can be launched in seconds. Emergency alerting can be sent to multiple devices such as SMS text, voice, and video and the school

has one-touch phone access to first responders.

• San Ramon Valley Unified School District in California uses Cisco Unified Communications to enable cost-effective, districtwide paging. One-button panic delivery simultaneously broadcasts emergency messages in real time to IP phones and two-way radios. Because the school district used its existing network, it saved 50 percent of the cost of a traditional PA system, primarily in areas of conduit, cabling, installation, and centralized management.

• South Kitsap Public Schools in Washington uses Cisco Unified Communications for outbound communications and notifications to parents. Automated attendance calls reach out to parents until contact is made. Parents simply press 1 to excuse and provide reasons for absences. By eliminating manual calling for absenteeism calls, the district’s administrative staff is more productive and the district sees labor and cost savings.

• Mobile County Public Schools in Alabama uses Cisco Unified Communications to support digital bulletin boards for clear, up-to-date school information as well as immediate warning of safety incidents. Evacuation information can be instantly displayed via the digital media boards, so everyone knows how to respond to various incidents.

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SchoolsEmpower Your School with Advanced Messaging

You can communicate securely and effectively inside your school and with partners outside your school using Cisco messaging solutions. Users can view real-time presence information and connect with contacts through email, instant messaging, and voicemail. The power of presence allows individuals to see who’s available at a glance.

The ability to efficiently access and deliver messages anywhere on any device using email, instant messaging, and voicemail provides proven productivity gains. According to a 2008 survey by research firm, Chadwick Martin Bailey, you can:

• Save up to 20 minutes per user daily by making it possible for people to reach colleagues on the first try with advanced messaging clients, instant messaging, and presence

• Save up to 40 additional minutes per user daily by making it possible for people to escalate instant messaging into phone calls and web conferences

• Save up to 20 minutes per user daily through more efficient message management (such as being able to manage all emails, voicemails, and faxes from a single inbox)

Cisco on Cisco: In a pilot, Cisco extended messaging capabilities to 3000 of its own field sales users. Mobile workers enjoy capabilities such as single number reach, instant messaging, presence, video, click-to-call, and impromptu web conferencing. These capabilities all work together to provide an additional 65 minutes of mobile worker productivity every day. Cisco expects that this additional productivity will provide a projected annual value of US$87.5 million for Cisco. And these savings can be used to fund other productivity-building, cost-cutting projects.

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SchoolsEmpower Mobile Workers

Extending collaborative capabilities to mobile devices keeps everyone productive even when they’re on the move. With Cisco mobile applications, you can connect, communicate, and collaborate using smartphones. Mobile workers can:

• Use multimedia collaboration tools such as voice, video, and instant messaging to participate in WebEx meetings—from their smartphones

• Access unified communications capabilities—from their smartphones

• Automatically move active calls between Wi-Fi and the cellular network—from their Nokia smartphones and BlackBerry phones

These and other advanced capabilities can have a big impact on your mobile workforce, making it possible for you to:

• Increase worker productivity

• Improve responsiveness to constituents

• Control costs by making mobile devices extensions of the network

• Enable people to connect, communicate, and collaborate using their smartphones


From classroom learning, to collaborative research, to meeting with colleagues around the world, Cisco TelePresence conferencing dramatically improves an institution’s ability to collaborate effectively. By enabling people to meet, share documentation, and make decisions in real time, unencumbered by geography, the Cisco TelePresence system reduces the need for frequent travel and all of its associated costs.

Fontana Unified School District in California uses Cisco TelePresence conferencing to conduct district administrative meetings, to expose students to industry leaders and learning resources, to enable group brainstorming, and to build essential teamwork skills. The Cisco TelePresence system helps the district distribute its knowledge and expertise across 40 schools, and exposes students and staff to the latest technology tools.

“By providing advanced communications services, we are equipping our students with the skills needed to succeed in this evolving, globalized world. TelePresence is so easy to use, that it was a ‘no-brainer’ to move forward with it. If you can use a phone, you can use TelePresence.”—Randy Bassett, CTO, Fontana Unified School District

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