Educational Service Center Region 13, Texas, USA
Region 13 is one of 20 non-regulatory agencies established in the late 60’s by the Texas legislature to provide both technical media services and serve as a liaison between the Texas Education Agency and the local schools districts.
The Regional Service Centers serve by disseminating information, conducting training and consultation for both federal and state programs. It supports 60 school districts, 17 Texas counties, numerous Charter schools and institutes of higher education.
The ultimate goal of Region 13 is assisting the schools to provide quality products/services that improve student performance while saving costs. Carol Teitelman, Coordinator Distance Learning Programs, is then constantly looking for affordable technology to advance the ESC mission. Region 13 adopted video conferencing to deliver distance learning to classrooms beginning in the early 1990’s.
“Like most of my colleagues across the United States, I have many school districts that have limited broadband internet access and limited funds to acquire video conferencing equipment.” said Ms. Teitelman. “As a result, they cannot participate fully in many of the academic, remediation or enrichment programs offered through our statewide Texas Educational Telecommunications Network (TETN).”
ClearSea offered Region 13 a turn-key solution to their needs as it provides a standards compliant video solution that can utilize existing network as well as 3G/4G to allow existing devices to connect with any H.323 or SIP video solution. With ClearSea, rural area schools can to turn their existing PC, MAC and Smartphones (Android and iOS) into video endpoints becoming more efficient with the use of video conferencing and being able to participate in programs they had difficulty connecting to before without the cost of purchasing dedicated appliances.
“We installed a trial system in November of 2010 and completed the installation in January of 2011. After only a month, at least five new elementary classrooms have been able to participate in programs that they’ve never had access to before. And new requests for access have begun to pour in from all over the region.” said Ms. Teitelman.
“We have made connections to ongoing conferences from the palm of our hands and even used the device to send a regional meeting out to a half dozen schools with good video and exceptional audio.”
Students in the region also plan to use ClearSea to “Ask the Expert” via video conference for some of their engineering students.
And other applications are being found all the time. Administrators that used to view only streamed meetings to avoid having to travel to video meeting rooms now interact in real time using ClearSea, improving both participation and productivity.
The upcoming challenges will be to keep up with the number of connections that people want to make through the new solution and find the funding to expand if it continues to grow in use. According to Ms. Teitelman “so far, it’s been a huge success and we are looking forward to having more and more classrooms find out how they can energize learning with connections to the world. The next project will be putting these into the hands of high school students.”
Moreover, thanks to the deployment of the new video conferencing system it will be possible to increase the number of distance learning projects and save costs at the same time.
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