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In business, most people are aware of the benefits that videoconferencing can bring – reducing travel, improving productivity, assisting collaboration and lowering your carbon footprint. But do the same attractions apply to videoconferencing in schools?
 Videoconferencing is already in use within education, from the few early adopters who purchased systems to connect over ISDN, through to the growing numbers of schools, universities and colleges now connected through broadband technology. Many UK schools have implemented videoconferencing following the roll-out of the National Education Network (NEN), a national core of regional networks made up of component or associated wide area networks (eg. Learning Grids or regional broadband consortia [RBCs).
Delivered through local networks – and nationally via the SuperJANET IP backbone – the NEN provides dedicated education, harnessing the power of broadband to deliver content and services to the classroom. It is optimised for data intensive applications, such as videoconferencing, and is safe and secure to enable pupils, teachers and parents to work confidently together. Its high quality, high bandwidth connection creates a powerful level of performance, reliability and control, which is not achievable on the public internet.
The NEN has, in effect, delivered the power that schools really need in order to carry out content hosting, video streaming and of course high quality videoconferencing.
Pupils at schools connected to a grid or RBC can now not only videoconference with other pupils in their region, but also nationally with schools or organisations via regional interconnects to JANET (the UK’s education and research network) and the JANET Videoconferencing Service (JVCS). And unlike ISDN, videoconferencing over IP is effectively free of charge.
Benefits to education
So why should schools be using videoconferencing?
Videoconferencing adds another dimension to learning. It enables children to collaborate and interact with each other locally, nationally or internationally. In Whitley Bay, for example, a school uses videoconferencing to teach languages by bringing partner schools together from France, Germany and Spain. Students speak directly to foreign counterparts to learn how to pronounce words correctly and learn more fluency.
Besides other schools, there are many institutions and organisations including museums, libraries, archives and specialist content providers with whom schools can connect. One organisation that has embraced video conferencing as a means of extending its educational experience for schools is the National Space Centre in Leicestershire. By making use of a powerful feature available to most videoconferencing systems, alongside the video call, they can also share data, whether this is slides, images or text. The Space Centre runs a number of ‘E-Missions’ using an Aethra video conferencing system. In one mission, ‘Operation Montserrat’, school pupils are connected with a ‘Commander’ at the Space Centre via a video conferencing link, and they have to form an emergency response team to deal with a volcano and hurricane threatening the island simultaneously. This is linked directly to the National Curriculum for Key Stages 2, 3 and 4. The fully proactive session is based on real-life events that took place in 1997, and features video footage taken at the time, and data based on the flow of lava from the volcano, wind speeds, etc.
‘Operation Montserrat’ was carried out in 90-minute sessions at over 150 schools around the country last year in a learning exercise that covers many different curriculum-based subjects including geography, science and maths. One of the other key advantages of being involved in this videoconferencing initiative is that the schools save time and the cost of travel, and benefit the environment by cutting out the inevitable coach trip to the Space Centre.
Linking different locations
By utilising the services of JVCS, or directly through a suitably enabled videoconferencing system, a number of schools can jointly hold what is known as a multi-point videoconference. This is where three or more locations all join in the same video call and is ideal for schools collaborating on local initiatives, who want to share and discuss ideas.
For schools looking to invest for the future, cost-effective videoconferencing is now available in HD. Most, if not all HD systems are backward-compatible with older, non-HD units, but it is important to be aware that some models require much higher bandwidths to operate at HD (720p) resolution than others; an important factor to take into account as most locations have a limited amount of bandwidth available. Full HD (1080p) systems are also available but they do require considerably higher bandwidths. The main benefit of an HD system is that it can provide sharper, clearer pictures, enhancing the ‘virtual’ nature of the conference for students. |
