5 Reasons K-12 Desperately Needs Webcasts, Webinars and On-Demand Video

Hello.

Welcome to our continuing series of live webinars

documenting the creative use of Mediasite around the world.

I'm Sean Brown, Vice President of Education for Sonic

Foundry, and today's webinar is entitled, "Five Reasons K

Through 12 Desperately Needs Webcasts, Webinars, and On

Demand Video." We have almost 100 people online right now.

Welcome to all of you joining us.

We have people representing school districts in almost

every single US state, most provinces in Canada, as well

as institutions in Italy, China, New Zealand, Singapore,

and Australia.

So welcome to you all.

Before we get started, I'd like to point out a few

housekeeping tips.

If you are watching us in our advanced silver light player

with a black background, if you allow your mouse to hover

below the video frame, you'll notice a

horizontal control bar.

In the classic player, with the white background, there

are persistent icons above my head.

In either player, you will see what looks

like a speech bubble.

Use this button if you'd like to pose a question at any time

to my guests, who I'll introduce shortly.

I'll take your questions at the end of today's

presentation.

I encourage you to provide your email address, which is

an option when you're asking a question, in case I can't get

to it during the webinar.

My guests have agreed to answer those questions off

line, so we can get to all of your thoughts and curiosity

about the presentation.

There's also supplementary information available in the

Links icon in the classic player, with the white

background, and behind the Information icon--

the I icon--

in the advanced player with the black background.

Now to introduce my guests.

On the far left, Jeff Baxter works in the Department of

Communication at Memphis City Schools.

As a special projects coordinator, Jeff works on the

district's website, and administers the Mediasite

webcasting platform throughout the district.

Jeff received a Bachelor of Science from the University of

Memphis in Human Learning and Development, and has worked as

a classroom teacher, instructional facilitator,

technology coordinator, and technology specialist.

To my immediate left is Scott Holcomb.

He began his teaching career as an elementary school

teacher and school based technology coordinator for

students in Memphis City Schools.

Taking time off from the traditional classroom in 2004,

he joined a small group of nerdy-- as he describes it, I

think they're just normal people like me.

Nerdy and dedicated teachers who made up the instructional

technology department for the district, serving as an

instructional technology specialist. He works hands on

with fellow educators in better integrating technology

into the classroom, as well as pushing open the envelope of

instructional technology via Mediasite at

the district level.

Scott has a Master's in Education from Auburn, and as

well, as just obtained his administrative license in the

state of Tennessee.

Congratulations.

You may recognize my guests, you are two time winners?

Two time winners of Sonic Foundry Rich Media Impact

Awards for their work at Memphis City Schools.

So, welcome guys.

Thank you so much.

You have some prepared remarks for us?

Absolutely.

We want to thank you for having us.

We really appreciate being here, and given the

opportunity to share what we're doing in Memphis.

And what we'd like to do is start off just giving you a

brief idea of what Memphis City Schools is

actually made up of.

We're actually the 23rd largest school district in the

United States, largest district in

the state of Tennessee.

We serve about 100,000 students

within the city schools.

there's about 200 schools that we're working with.

18,000 employees, and of that 18,000, there are 7,000

teachers that we're responsible for.

In our department, our primary job was to provide the

hands-on support for teachers, teaching them to integrate

technology within the classroom.

And so we were presented in 2006 with the Mediasite box.

And it was quite an interesting experience.

It was more like a sales pitch.

Kind of, here's this device, and you know, this is

everything that it us.

And of course, just a reminder, we are teachers.

Public school teachers.

And we're a little nerdier than most of the other

teachers, so we kind of looked at each other, and Jason was

in our group, and we said, we can do this

with a video camera.

Those were our exact words.

Nothing that we couldn't do with iMovie and a

little bit of time.

Which we soon found out, we'll discuss later, was a bad idea.

It didn't work out too well.

So what we decided to do was go ahead and test it.

Sonic Foundry was gracious enough to let us borrow one of

their boxes, and just to give us that hands-on comfort

feeling of it.

And it went very well.

we recorded our first presentation in October of

'06, and we decided to take the cheap route, because

that's what teachers do sometimes, and went with the

LX box server first. And it didn't take us six months

before we decided we really need to upgrade.

Because as the two nerds got together, we started talking,

it got to the point where we were asking questions of Sonic

Foundry, well, can we do this, and can we try this?

And they said, well, you really need to upgrade.

And we pitched that to our boss, and fortunately, it

worked out for our advantage.

Before you go any further, I guarantee there are some

people who aren't as tech savvy going, you know, you

guys are nerdy, but how--

I mean, how does a teacher learn to do this stuff?

And here's the secret.

We played with the buttons until stuff worked.

And we did a lot of communication with Sonic

Foundry, great support.

And that's how we got everything working.

Because I mean, we're not IT professionals.

We're not sound engineers.

We're not video engineers.

We just knew that we had to get PD out to teachers, and we

had that idea of video professional development on

demand, just like we were

watching TV. Right.

Our first studio really consisted of the recorder-- we

got the portable recorder--

we had a little canon camera that came with it, we had one

lapel mic, and that was about it, that we

all started out with.

It was pretty cut and dried and simple.

And you can see from the slide,

you can see the borrowed--

and we use that term loosely--

the borrowed 32 inch, 20 year old, television CRT, that's

all glass, 200 pounds.

Yeah, we kind of commandeered some stuff, we'll get to later

on, and how we did this.

But as we started doing the presentations, people started

noticing, you know, what are you guys doing, and how is

this working?

And we had to start acquiring equipment, and that's where we

ended up last year.

And then what we've done is we moved to

adding some more equipment.

We found a mixing board somewhere,

and we applied that.

We are able to later purchase a switcher, because some of

the departments wanted to show videos and external stuff

outside of the presentation, so we were able to convince

people that that's a good investment.

We'll talk later on that one.

And then we found this really cool little application called

Prompt 7.0, and it wasn't that expensive for us to buy.

But the teachers were coming in with these giant post-it

note pieces of paper with their scripts written out on

it, and they plastered it to the window, which you can see

the center picture there behind us, and they're trying

to read the script because they wanted to be perfect, and

our teachers were a little intimidated by the fact that

they're being on camera.

So we started to try using Word, and some other things,

that just didn't worked out.

But this prompt allowed us to go ahead and have them send us

the presentation in Rich Text Format or Word, and we just

incorporate it into this little application, and it

works like a teleprompter.

It scrolls, and we can change the font size, the background

color, and all that fun stuff.

So that's where we moved for our creativeness.

And then we started adding some accessories to the lab.

You could tell my little light there on that picture there,

that stole from, I mean I liberated from

our conference room.

So we can have some interesting three point

lighting separated from the background.

And then we were able to bring in the smart board.

We wanted to push that envelope a little.

We brought the smart board in to do some live webcasts with

our teachers, which was amazingly successful.

Before you go any further, you know, we did this presentation

at Unleash.

2010 coming up when?

In April.

Unleash was great.

We did the presentation, kind of using the same slides that

you're watching right now.

And at the end we kind of got hit, because we had a few

people who, I think overall they thought we were trying to

stir up some sympathy for what we were doing, because if you

look at the next slide, it looks like a mess.

But really, we put these slides in, and we wanted to

convey that, again, a group of teachers--

not a lot of money, you know, I mean, it's not a $60,000

$70,000 $80,000 investment--

but we're doing like teachers do best. We're taking what we

need, that idea, and then we're getting the equipment

that we need.

And piece by piece, we're either finding it.

And I think that's way a lot of the school districts,

especially public school districts, tend to operate.

Like Jeff's said, piece by piece at a time, and this is

what we next, this is what we need next.

And you know, that lamp doesn't look all that great,

but it's what we needed at the time, and it worked out for

what we were doing.

And I think it did well, as far as when we

were shooting video.

Like Scott said, you know, if you're in K-12, you can really

understand what we've got going on here.

Because, you know, sometimes in order to be successful, you

are going to have to find some creative measures just to try

to push your cause.

And we knew, as a group, that this was going to be amazingly

successful within our district.

We knew that it had the potential of revolutionizing

Memphis city schools.

And so, it wasn't going to hurt anything for us to go

ahead and play with it.

We weren't live with anything at the time.

We wanted to see what we could do, and what we

could make of it.

A lot of this stuff, actually turned out to be a mess like

it was, because we were now given the opportunity to go

from location to location to set stuff up, so we had to be

able to to grab and run real fast. We didn't have a second

set at that time, of everything.

So we were able to just go ahead, and leave it hanging

out, grab the wires, put them in the bag, and run.

And in this location, which is a teaching and learning

academy, it's where we bring all of the teachers within the

district to do most of the professional development.

And so, some vendors would come in, and we had to move

the recorder to a particular room.

And so in this situation right here, we were able to go ahead

and bring in, for still-- you know, not very active

presentations, but teachers could come in and do a face to

face, or what want to-- in a comfortable setting.

And something like that.

So this basically summarizes what we've tried to do.

We went through a lot of trial and error.

Two nerdy guys sitting down, saying, wouldn't it be cool if

we did this.

And so we just started playing around.

Can this happen?

What do we need?

We sought answers to our questions from people we knew.

I'm going to put in a plug in for the users group, that was

such a fantastic thing.

Even the Unleash Conference, because we were able to

network with so many people, and get so many great ideas,

that we would call up on the phone and say, hey

how did you do this?

And then we would try to look at what they'd done, and then

turn around and make our own version of it.

And as crude as it may be, but then when the people saw that,

hey, this is working.

And we would tell them, you know, we could do so much

better if we had--

And then when they saw the pay value in something like that,

most departments were willing to go ahead and foot some of

the money-- outside of our department-- to cover the cost

of some of the materials that we were using in the lab.

And then we started also with presentations within our

department, too.

We actually started taking some of the--

as far as our jobs were concerned, we were to teach

teachers how to integrate technology.

And we were having the same problems over and over.

What we did was that, we would take the presentations, and

take Mediasite, and we would record these things.

And we'd go in the classroom, and the teacher would say, I

don't know how to do that.

Well, let me show you this cool little application.

And it saves us a lot of time, because we weren't repeating

herself to 7,000 teachers.

And we had this rule, that when you go out to a school--

because I had at least 30 schools, and each one of us

had about 30, 35 schools--

if we were asked 10 times the same thing, like how do I--

you know, how do I do this?

How do I do that?

You know, in the past, we were like having to explain it, or

having to set up another session, during a teacher

planning time.

Which, you know, if you're in public education, that teacher

planning time is gold.

So we came up--

Again, going back to Mediasite.

Recording those things that we kind of take for granted that

teachers should know.

Now, all we have to do is say, well, you

know it's not a problem.

Just kind of listen to what I'm talking about now, and

when we're finished, I'm going to give you a link, or I'm

going to email it to you, or I'll have it on a piece of

paper and give it to you--

but these will be the URLs for the

videos that we've recorded.

On the things that maybe you forgot, that we did

earlier last week.

And that alleviates a lot of the stress of, I got to

remember all that stuff.

You know, this is one more thing I got to do.

No, no, we're teachers.

We understand.

This is not one more thing.

This is a, when I'm finished, you know, let me go back and I

can watch it.

To me, I think that's key.

A lot of teachers think that that professional development

aspect online is going to take away teachers.

And it doesn't.

I mean, it's a ancillary, it's a, you know, this is what we

do afterward to kind of remember what

we just went through.

And you know, I think there's another part that I get

started on, how, when we're in teacher meetings, we're not

really listening.

We're grading papers, we're thinking about what we're

going to eat for dinner tonight.

Half of the people are ADD like I am, and don't remember

part of the conversation.

So in the middle of it, I'm texting, or doing something

else, or something like that.

Or you know, I remember going into classrooms, and I'm

showing teachers how to do stuff, and they're frantically

writing things down on a piece of paper.

And they'll call me back three days later.

I lost that paper.

I don't remember where it was.

So we're trying to not be enablers of the old school.

And really move them into something that they can pull

up on their own, and teach them how to fish, instead of

you know, bringing it to them every time.

Our first stress test really came with our reading series.

And this just blew my mind.

This really sold the district on web support, as far as

webcasting and what have you.

A lot of teachers were seeing, a lot of instructors were

seeing, in PD, that we were doing this in the classrooms,

and telling everybody, you know, hey, go to Mediasite.

And the director of our reading department came up and

said, we have a problem.

We just adopted a reading series, this is in June,

they're bringing in people from the vendor in July to go

ahead and do training on the new reading series, and the

teachers have to start teaching it in August.

Big problems. One, teachers are already on vacation, and

they're not going to want to give that up.

Two, the department's going to have to pay them stipends in

order to come in, plus travel, in most cases.

Three, you may leave the end of the year in fourth grade,

but then you're going to turn around and come back, and the

principal says, I think you're going to be needed teaching

second grade.

And so now they have to be retrained.

Or, you know, you may turn around and get a brand new

teacher, fresh out of school, or fresh into the district,

that has never worked with the reading series, and you need

to go ahead and train them as well.

And so, we talked with the vendor, and the vendor says,

yeah, go ahead and record it on Mediasite, that's great.

You know, this will work out perfect for us.

And so, we figured that our return on this one--

taking into account travel, having the vendor come in,

having to pay teachers to teach it, taking teachers out

of classrooms, stipend, some or all of that stuff, saved

the district nearly $50,000 when you

couple all of that together.

And that was just one area.

And it didn't even hiccup.

I mean, it was smooth, we had no problems with it, it didn't

cause any stress on our network, and

they're still using it.

There are teachers going on today looking at that.

And as for those people who are listening, who are the

more techie IT people at the district level, we

know all about you.

And we work really close.

And we get those threats of, hey, don't

bring our network down.

That's too much bandwidth.

But you know, we're constantly keeping that in the back of

our heads, too, as we push this out.

And to be honest, I don't think we've ever really an

issue with hogging bandwidth.

It's not like 7,000 teachers at the same

time are hitting play.

That, if we know that it's going to be big, we just talk

with our IT department, and they just reallocate the

resources for us.

I say that like it's easily done, but we've got to get

enough lead time for something like that to happen.

The next thing, because of this, was the exhibition of

student work.

Want to tell them about that?

Well you know, our superintendent, deputy

superintendent, came up with the idea of, all our students

K through 12, are doing such a great job.

And we are really hopping on the bandwagon for project

based learning.

So you know, as an elementary school teacher, we've always

had some end culminating project that we had.

Well the idea was to spread that from K through 12.

So all of a sudden we had these at--

I think it was twice a year--

fall and spring exhibits that students had an end product

that they created.

And that was put on display in the schools.

Well we had jurors, who were stakeholders,

our community folks.

And they basically were giving a training via Mediasite,

which helped a lot.

Because the old way to do it was to crank out a videotape,

and then that videotape would be sent to either, each

person, or a central location, or holding 2,000, 3,000 people

in one location and doing a mass training.

Well with Mediasite, we videotaped better, and put it

out for the stakeholder, the public, the parents, who were

going to be jurors.

Who volunteered to do such a great job in looking at these

end products.

And I think at one time, there were like 3,000 views on the

video training, for juror training.

Actually, it was a little more than that, because we were

required to have 5,000 jurors.

And these are stakeholders within business communities,

within public offices, within medical, higher ed, all

watching this.

And several would watch it two or three times, or show to

their colleague.

Hey, I'm going to go do this, why don't you check

this out and see?

Well see, and that's the other thing about the process of

doing video PD, is the archivability.

You know, where else can you say, I missed that, or I tuned

out on that exhibition thing.

I wish I could watch it again.

Well you can.

It's there.

24-7, 365, you know, that's my mantra to teachers.

24-7, 365, video PD is at your beck and call.

In your pajamas and bunny slippers.

Our first--

and you can see the trend going here a

little bit, too, hopefully.

That our first initial deployment of the application

was for professional development.

Our next phase was bringing in the community, which is our

exhibition of student work, tying it together.

We also had the town hall meetings, where our

superintendent would go out to different

areas within the district.

And we would videotape that for those who weren't able to

make it to the town hall meetings, and do those live.

And then our newsroom, which is relatively new.

This gives us an opportunity to get our story out.

Those in education know that there are people that would

like to examine everything with a microscope, and really

pick apart things, and then blow it up to be a lot bigger

than what it is.

So what we wanted to do was give the public an opportunity

to come somewhere and hear the truth of what's really going

on, what really happened, so they can get both sides of the

story, and something along those lines.

And allows us as teachers, too, to get the information

from the district that we need to know, versus hearing it at

five o'clock, six o'clock, ten o'clock at night.

That really helps too.

Because the first thing that--

You know, the teachers hear stuff

faster than the internet.

You know, I can send a teacher an email telling her, you

know, I need you to send this to me, and he or

she may not get it.

But they can call me back and say, you know, I just heard--

So I think having the newsroom, throw that out, and

Mediasiting it, videotaping it, allowing that to be

presented to teachers, really filled that void of, I don't

know what's going on.

Or decreasing false information.

And here we have our new studio.

We're so proud of it.

Our wonderful deputy superintendent said, give them

what they need now.

He turned around and saw what we had, and said, you guys are

doing such a great job with this, let's go ahead and step

it up a notch.

That's right.

And if it wasn't for Felicia Fowler, our current boss now,

a lot of this stuff wouldn't be upgraded.

We'd still have that 32 inch old glass TV. So now you can

see in the slide, we've replaced that 32 inch old

school glass tube with two LCDs.

And you know, again, I'm the frugal teacher, and you know,

I just shopped online and got that.

And it really helps.

And you know, the compliment to me, when I hear the

presenter saying, I like this better than the old TV set,

because I couldn't see it too well.

So, I mean, this is really helping the presenter that

we've got in front of us to feel more comfortable in

presenting, and giving them everything they

need in front of them.

The lighting kit, inexpensive.

For those teachers who were on board with me, who are kind of

listening and I've got your attention perked up, I think

we spent maybe $199 for an entire lighting kit.

And that works out much better than liberating a lamp from a

conference room.

So now that you saw where we started, and where we ended

up, you know, how can we go ahead and think outside the

box to make this applicable to other people, and we just want

to show this as an example of what we've done.

But you know, we wanted to see about how do we get the word

about Mediasite out?

When we first won the Rich Media Impact Award that first

year, there were people in the district that didn't know

about the Mediasite application.

And we brought that back, and you know, they told everybody

in the district about it, and they go what's this Mediasite

thing, this video thing that you're doing?

Which is now a verb in our school district.

We're going to Mediasite it.

I think we went through two, three name changes, and I

think we settled on Mediasite.

MCS, Mediasite.

It was crazy.

So we started doing these presentations and sending them

out via hyperlink.

And then, all the departments were asking us, you know, how

many people are watching this?

And so we would send the reporting data, so they can

see how many people were actually watching the

presentations, and what have you.

So that was their proof ROI that what they're doing is

being successful.

We plopped it on our website and the word

started getting around.

And then the vendors saw that other vendors are using it,

and so they were--

Houghton Mifflin.

Learning Village.

I mean, they've taken off with using Mediasite as a platform

for professional development.

John Reed with Houghton Mifflin Learning Village will

come in, I think he's got probably the most videos out

there, and everything that we do inside Learning Village,

teachers get.

And I love the fact that, you know--

And again, I'm going back to being that teacher--

getting an email with a clickable hyperlink says, this

is where my video is.

Because not all teachers are tech savvy--

wake up call--

Not all teachers are tech savvy.

And it is hard for people outside of education to

conceptualize that our educators aren't running

around with iPhones, and surfing the

internet all the time.

But there are teachers who will get an email, they'll

click on it, and they appreciate that it goes right

to what they're supposed to see.

And that reporting data aspect--

what a way to sell a department head on video.

Music department.

How many people watched my video?

I can give you those numbers.

Accountability.

I can give you those numbers.

To turn around and say, you know, we can help you with

your presentation more if we had such and such equipment.

You know, and see how much people are looking at it, and

then they'll say, well how much would that cost?

And we hit them up, and boom.

We add more equipment to it.

But again, out the box, we're bringing in community, and the

conversation series, we have our deputy superintendent, and

people come in and discuss needs within the district too,

as a sit down talk show.

So that the employees have a line of communication coming

in as well about things within a district.

Going back to what Scott was talking about, this isn't a

very difficult application.

I mean, you did see a lot of wires, you did see a lot of

cables, but it's a matter of point and click.

It's really easy to use.

And there's not a huge learning curve,

as you would think.

There's a lot of stuff that comes in Mediasite that's

right out of the box.

That you can get going right out of the box.

But if you need support, MUG.

I'm going to put a MUG plug in right now.

Mediasite Users Group.

That's right.

Mediasite Users Group.

Get online, and there is a wealth of information, of

people, who are willing and ready to share what

they know with you.

Like minded folk.

That's right, like minded folk.

And we're K-12 on there, so don't be afraid to think that

you're talking to some engineer, or

something like that.

Thingy ma bobber actually is a word with us.

Or the doo flicky with the pins, that thing right there,

that works for me too.

Unleash is valuable too.

Convince your district or whatever to try to come out to

this, because the networking abilities.

Meeting these people face to face.

And sitting down brainstorming,

how did you do this?

A lot of stuff I learned was sitting down just talking to

people from all over the world.

You know, we've got friends in New Zealand.

We've got, you know, people from universities around the

area, and Alaska.

It's amazing just to see who's out there and

what they're doing.

And we're educators.

We like stealing other people's ideas, or liberating

other people's ideas.

Third grade.

That's what I taught, third grade.

Former mental health counselor.

So no--

I didn't go to ITT Tech, you know, there's no DeVry,

there's no-- it's just--

And we're just trying to encourage you to play.

Something that adults don't do too well, but

kids do really well.

And you're not on a timeline, you're not on a schedule.

Take advantage of the box, if Sonic Foundry

will let you use theirs.

And play, yeah.

Here's the really important.

Jeff's going to hit something really important, so everybody

write this down.

What are the three letters?

ROI.

Return on Investment.

That's not a word educators use a lot.

And so what we call it is proof it works.

And how can you prove to me it works?

Because there are a lot of people selling stuff to

education left and right.

And so, how are you going to go ahead and weed through all

this stuff to try to prove to your administration, to your

staff, that this is something that you need?

One of the ways that you could use this is, take an account

like we did with the reading series.

How much are you spending on travel, stipends, substitute

teachers, bringing in external training sources.

One of the things we'd like to see here shortly, is all these

OSHA required videos like "Blood Borne Pathogens," and

stuff like that.

Show them to the district without having to pass out

videotapes.

How much are you spending on media, like CDs to send to the

people, or videotapes.

How much are you paying the person to do all the recording

on something like that.

Or the duplicator, take that into consideration.

Also if they lose it, you know, this right here, they

can have on the go 24-7.

Look at the time it takes to make a presentation.

Take that into consideration.

Look at the cost of your public relations and your

communications as well.

That right there is huge for any school district.

Like what we're doing with the newsroom.

That really diverts a lot of information.

We were one of the recipients of the Bill Gates Grant, which

we received this year.

We received several million dollars to train teachers as a

teacher effectiveness initiative.

And so we were able to get this information out to the

community via Mediasite, via video, and it's out there for

everybody to see, and to learn, and understand what

it's all about.

So all the questions that we have come through Mediasite

newsroom for us.

Or a big change in you know, going from one health

insurance company to another.

That's a big ripple, and I think it's still rippling.

But all that information is out there, available to

teachers again, at a click of a button 24-7.

And the OSHA training, all that stuff, to me, that's

accountability and archivability.

Why send the same video that you've been using since 1985

over and over and over again, when it could be, you know,

redone, or placed in Mediasite, you

click it, watch it.

And something we're doing to kind of latch onto that

accountability, is using active directory.

Where a teacher signs onto their computer at school, and

it opens up things that they would have to remember, as far

as password, usernames.

And putting that-- and I think we're going to talk about that

a little bit, too, but adding that accountability of

tracking a teacher, as far as professional development.

And giving them credit for it.

Right.

Also if you have students at a remote locations, or you're

dealing with H1N1 issues, stuff like that.

How are they going to recover some of the content they lost.

Home bound, exactly.

Recovering some of the content they lost. Or even like, in

our situation, we got our language department who has

talked to us recently.

You got one school that teaches Russian, but a student

wants to learn French.

So instead of bussing the student from point A to point

B, they've got the information right there at their

fingertips, right within the school district.

So that saves you money there too, as well.

The music department.

Drew just created some videos on tuning instruments.

And you know, that's the cool thing about being the guy

behind the camera, is I'm experimenting with different

camera angles.

And you know, Dr. Drew is over there telling, me can you get

this right here?

Can you get my iPhone, a shot of my iPhone, as I use my

iPhone to tune instruments?

Now when he said that, I was like, yeah, come on.

So you know, that kind of pushes me too, to kind of--

And I'm open to anybody, when somebody comes in and says,

can you do this?

I don't know, we'll try.

Let's see.

And then, you know, more to the point to the K-12, there's

a lot of universities that are using this technology.

So it's an easy transition for students to go from

K-12 to higher ed.

And a lot of higher ed institutions are now requiring

portfolios, as far as acceptance to the

universities.

This is a great application for students to build a

portfolio, to archive it, in fact our school district is

now pushing that.

The portfolio development within the district.

Digital portfolios, exactly.

And so, you know, you're looking this as a tool, and

you look at this as a snapshot, and

it's got big dividends.

It pays off for us.

You know, if you really start thinking about this, it's

unlimited what you can do with this.

And you know, I have teachers who come in and say, I've have

done that webinar thing, I've done that webex.

It's not the same thing.

I mean, it's online, but it's not the same thing.

We'll get into that later today.

The slide that you see has at the top accountability.

And you see something that says PDMS, or Professional

Development Management System Basically that's a way for us

to use an online management system for courses that

teachers will have to take.

Either for in house professional development, or

maybe it's something that the state, or

school district requires.

And what we're doing--

and I was really excited--

is PDMS, inside that, either vendors and/or department

heads or teachers, are adding links, hyperlinks, to videos

that they've either created or had someone create for them.

And so the old standard of the teacher goes, logs on, takes a

course, via on-site, or now, via Mediasite, then they print

out an evaluation form, or go to a site that they can do an

online evaluation.

And they get credit for that.

I mean, that's really integrating two great features

into one system.

Get everything you need.

To me, it's evolving into the online university, but at a

district level for PD, which is great.

It's a natural evolution.

And we'll just go through the next of these real fast, for

the sake of time.

We're using applications like Web Monkey to evaluate some of

the things that teachers see, and then using attachments and

links within the actual viewer for teachers to download, do

an evaluation form, or answer some questions about the video

and send it back, so we know that they actually were able

to watch those presentations.

Or get credit.

Future plans for us right now.

We're looking at recording our board meetings.

And more town hall meetings, and having those archived.

We have a telecommunications center, which is our cable

channel 19, and we are working with integrating this

application with them.

And then addressing student needs is our next big push.

We want to look at doing peer to peer learning for

student test prep.

You know, having a student sit down and watch a teacher on a

video with something is mundane and annoying to them,

pretty much for the most part, because this is

what they do all day.

But if you've got another student teaching test prep to

students, it's a little bit more interesting to them.

And then also addressing things like home bound, and

special needs, and that sort of direction is what we're

looking at for us in the future.

And so hopefully, you know, within the next year or so,

we'll be able to go ahead and share what we're doing with

the students, and at what large scale that's happenning,

and how successful we were at something like that.

Those are great, great comments.

Great presentation that you guys put together, which like

I said earlier in the broadcast, Scott and Jeff been

kind enough to share their slides.

And they're available in the links or the I information

icon in your viewer, as I described before.

So they can start to liberate some of your ideas.

A bunch of questions have come in here, so with time we have

left, I'm going to hit you guys with those, if that's OK.

Love the theme of, first you had to steal.

The first question that came in while you were talking,

when I guess the picture of your first studio was up, with

a lot of wires.

A person said, your studio looks complicated, but you

said earlier, it's really easy.

Do you need all of that stuff?

I know you said it was simple, just wondering where to begin.

Now that came in right away, but if you could still

emphasize that.

Actually, a lot of that-- if you're a Type A person, that

was probably a nightmare for you.

And I know my wife is watching this, she was cringing when

she saw that's slide too, I know it.

A lot of it is not, there's not really a

lot of cables there.

There's long cables.

We actually staged that shot.

To make us look really good.

Before and after.

Mediasite Home and Garden Channel.

That is a result of us planning on expanding.

First off, we had the Mediasite box.

And really all we had was an audio cable that connected to

our wireless lapel mic, and we had a video cable, which was S

video, that connected to the Mediasite box, and then the

VGI cable, and that's it.

And it's labeled on the side of the recorder for you, and

you've got your first presentation.

That is fantastic for someone who wants to sit down and do a

quick 15-minute presentation.

There's nothing complicated about it, that's that.

Now what we did is, with the reading series, they wanted to

show a video.

So for us to be able to show a video, we said, well we're

going to need a switcher.

Because we needed to switch back and forth.

So that's when we got on MUG, that's when we got-- that's

the users group--

We talked to friends.

We talked to AV people we knew and found out which switcher

we want, and then we plugged the switcher in And then as

more and more people started demanding more and more, and

we want to accommodate them and encourage them, we started

adding stuff.

Like the second speaker.

Can I get it in the shot with--

Well, what do need?

We need one more wireless microphone.

So we're going to--

Like today.

We have three wireless microphones.

And so we picked up a mixing board, because we knew that we

had to have a mixing board.

Liberated.

Liberated, yes, liberated.

I was listening.

You guys are going to get in trouble.

We're going to get back to Memphis and our jobs are going

to be gone.

That's my lamp!

Tell us about that liberating.

But it really, to start out with--

Start small, and then expand it as you go.

Because once you start working in between all these requests

that people are doing, it starts making sense to you.

You know, audio in, audio out.

Video in, video out.

It starts making a lot more sense.

So don't over complicate it at the very beginning, I guess we

should have predicated that.

And don't let that picture--

I mean, again, it's lack of housekeeping

on our end, as well.

We should be tying up cables.

We should actually be taking cable out that

we don't need anymore.

But I think, you know, when Jeff and I were both in there,

we'd say, well, we'll need it at another time, so we'll

leave it right there.

The question was from Jeff's wife.

Another question came in.

There's a couple that are very similar, so I'll synthesize

them together.

People want to know what's more complex, the AV camera

aspects of working and creating Mediasite

presentations, or dealing with the Mediasite piece of it, the

recording part?

You know I was--

Jeff was really good at the back end part.

The content management?

I was more of the, you know, I get this to work.

I can shoot the video, I can get the sound.

You know, and he did some of that stuff on the other side.

But Jeff really is good at what I call

the back end stuff.

And you know, he still does that.

I do more of the shooting.

To me, it's just, the video camera's stationary.

All I'm doing is telling the person where to sit, and maybe

zooming in and out, adjusting white balance, and that's it.

Turning the lights on and positioning the lights.

That's the end of what I do.

And hit record.

That's it.

Now, on the other side, is the content management.

Which Jeff showed me two years ago, and after using it over

and over, you know, I'm getting to where I don't have

to call him all the time.

Whereas when I first came in to it, I would say, Jeff, you

remember what you did?

You've got to come back and show me.

So it can be daunting, but it's nothing that a--

Again, third grade teacher, mental health counselor.

What teacher?

Sixth.

Sixth grade.

You know, if we can do it, you can do it.

If Scott can do it, anybody can do it.

But you know, the content management, I would say, it

goes back to start off simple.

Use what's out of the box, experiment, and play.

I did fine.

I didn't know as much about Kodak settings and everything

that I wanted to, so I went and played with it.

And then once I got comfortable with it, it made

more sense.

I could look up a VCR or a DVD player, so the video aspect of

it was nothing to me.

But learning the Kodak settings was a little bit of a

challenge, but it didn't take much time to figure it out.

It wasn't bad at all.

And don't forget--

You know, we've said it like, maybe five, six times.

You've got that Mediasite Users Group aspect.

You've got that big bowl of knowledge of like minded

people who understand what you're talking about.

It's almost like going to Radio Shack and saying, you

know, I need a plug to go here, and they go, no, this is

what you mean.

This is how you say it.

And this is how it can make you sound better.

Instead of a plug, how about one eight jack

to a quarter inch--

Teach you how to--

There's quite a few questions, that are basically the same

one, that I get all the time, which is like, what kind of

camera do you use.

So you said you use a Canon camera.

People want to know, do you use a fancy expensive camera?

Did you start small?

What do you use?

We have a little old Canon.

I guess we can put the model number.

It's like a net Cam.

Net Cam, yeah.

That we use.

And then every once in a while we'll break out one of our

little camcorders, the Panasonic camcorder.

Just the same ones that are in the district for other

applications.

Here's an example.

Drew had me do the music stuff.

And I basically, out of my cabinet, took out a-- it had

to have been 12 year old, mini DV, you know with the

Cassette, mini DV video camera.

And I just put a S video link into it, that was it.

It looks great.

The optics are great.

You know, you don't have to go out and buy--

it'd be nice--

a $2,000, $3,000 video camera.

Right now, there's a nice camera that's shooting us.

I'm jealous.

Yeah, but we couldn't afford that.

I wonder if we could liberate that.

We couldn't justify that.

But, you know, a $200 camera, or a camera you've got in a

closet in your school, it's fine.

That's all you need, it's just video camera.

That goes to another question people asked about lighting.

You use lighting.

Is it necessary?

We shot both using fluorescent in that lamp,

as kind of a backlight.

And when we went to actually paying for--

We actually got, we got the communications,

the TV folk, involved.

And they let us borrow a set of lights, and let us see what

we were missing out on.

Once we saw all those lights put in,

An inexpensive, really good increase in quality.

Because people have commented, when you've won these awards,

about the studio quality.

You know, we can't do that in our school district.

You're saying the secret sauce is good

lighting, good backdrop.

Right.

There was one time, I think we did this for the submission

for RMA, we actually had a whiteboard.

One of those--

It would reflect light.

-to do the fill light.

We had someone stand there from the window on the other

side of us, and we had them do the fill light.

I mean, we were using windows as a key light, and you know,

we were just being creative.

But we had that dark blue shower curtain as a

background.

It is a shower curtain?

It is a shower curtain, we're proud of it.

Target?

Walmart?

I think it was, I don't know.

Walmart, Target whatever.

But we needed to separate them from the background, because

it looked like they were blending in.

Here's a great question from a friend of mine in Chicago.

Does Mediasite have a protected login for teachers.

This person is wondering how confidential their content

would be, with the use of the Mediasite system.

Absolutely.

There's a protected side of it.

In fact, we're working on trying to get ours integrated

with our active directory.

And so when the teacher logs in, only the people that are

on the active directory account can see that.

So the same login that they use to log into email, and

stuff like that, at their desk, is going to secure and

sort the Mediasite.

To control what this teacher John can see, and what this

teacher Sue can see, and all that.

We're very proud of our integrated security.

It's got to be incredibly important in a K-12 enterprise

environment.

It is, it really is, especially.

Probably about 95% of our stuff is wide open, and about

5% is locked down still.

When the superintendent, deputy superintendent, needs

to get stuff out to teachers, and they do that at the

communication center where they have the great equipment

to videotape it, then Jeff usually locks it down, and

there's an email, mass email sent out to teachers, and it

gives them the username and password.

So you know, it's video that may be just sent for your eyes

only, kind of a sensitive issue material.

Another question that came in, and this is also similar to

some other questions, is about getting started.

People still want to know.

Who did you have to get around the table to get the green

light on that first Mediasite purchase?

Did you try the iMovie, non Mediasite approach first, and

then, you know, use that as evidence?

Or how did you get started?

Well really, we were playing around with this concept

before we got Mediasite.

We were doing videocasting and podcasting.

And we were trying to show to teachers, and everything.

And Scott, poor Scott would spend hours back in his cube

editing video.

In fact, we did this one with the Memphis zoo, and the

walkie talkie from the curator there, the signal conflicted

with our wireless lapel mic, so all he got was this garbled

munched junk, but fortunately we were able to recover some

audio off the camera--

Secondary camera.

Yeah, he had to link audio and lips, and stuff like that,

together, and it just took a long period

of time to do that.

And then whenever, once we were able to play, and what

have you, and we were able to push something out like that,

you know for trial, and people saw the quality, the success,

the ease of use, it didn't take much at all.

In fact, our boss at the time, our supervisor at the time,

saw it and was immediately sold.

Just on how much less time of Scott's it took to produce

something of high quality.

And that's, in my experience in working with K-12 districts

around the world, that's exactly, you know, usually a

major selling point when you can show how much time it

saves, because staff time is so incredibly valuable.

And actually, you know feel free to email us, and say, you

know, give us some points on how to sell this.

I mean, you know, we've been in the business of selling

this, and we're still selling it, believe it or not.

We're still selling it to departments in our own region,

in our district, that even though we've won two--

knock on wood, two great awards for what we've been

doing, there are still departments that, what?

What is this thing?

And then when they see it, they're like, wow.

And that's why your exposure ideas

are incredibly important.

One other question I want to make sure we get in under the

wire, because different people asked this in different ways,

but this is the best phrasing of it.

Who owns the systems?

You want to tell them how many you have. They want to know

how many Mediasites you have. Does Mediasite sit within one

specific department, like PD, professional development?

How do you handle competing requests for use?

Do you run into conflicts?

So give the dirty laundry.

We've got two servers.

We've got the podcast server, and then we've got our regular

server that has the database and the application.

Actually, it's three, because we've got the split up.

And then we've got two mobile units.

Two mobile Mediasite capture recorders.

Two boxes.

Two carry on boxes.

One sits in my office, at communications, so they can

feed it to me real fast. The other one you saw at Scott's

in the studio.

And he schedules most of the--

So you schedule the whole studio.

Not just the Mediasite box?

This is how it works.

That studio, that box stays there.

And when we need a box, I'll come get the box from Jeff to

go take somewhere.

So yours is the mobile unit?

Generally.

And then, we actually--

The Department of--

actually, we were considered Instructional

Technology at the time--

used our funds to purchase the application, and then right

now everybody's using it.

But now our instructional department, which was under PD

and curriculum, has now merged with our IT department.

So we're using IT funds for it.

Since everybody uses that, it all kind of

blends in together now.

It originally started--

and I understand where that question's coming from-- it

originally started as PD funded.

This device PD funded, but it was the technology aspect of

professional development, if that makes any sense.

And after that, I mean, there was really--

when you shot the video and showed what it can

do, that was it.

I mean, it literally speaks for itself visually, when you

can see this stuff.

And that accountability aspect of, here's how many people

just watched that video that you just did, versus the five

people that you had after school.

Well, in three days, 60 people just watched that video.

That's impressive.

People can understand that, why do I continue to, you

know, come to a 3:00, 4:00 thing, if nobody's showing up,

where I can shoot it in the studio, it'll take me five,

ten, minutes, and anybody can watch at any time.

As far as scheduling, basically, they email me, and

we'll set up a time.

And usually, I can turn around and give somebody a time to

come in and shoot their video within the next day.

I can do it as quick as that.

Sometimes that day.

And we'll shoot it in five, ten, fifteen minutes, and

we're done.

It's not a two hour adventure, unless you get, you know,

people who kind of get a little nervous in

front of the camera.

I try real hard to make them feel

comfortable behind the camera.

That's another aspect of Mediasite that is just

inherent in what it does is.

You do have to kind of play the, it's all right.

You know, the 17 times that you just messed up on that

word, it's OK.

I did it 22 times.

You know, you start doing that stuff.

The teacher in you comes out, even when you're helping

people be on camera.

Well, my last question to you, we're out of time, but if you

had to sum up-- you both talked about how

important ROI is.

So if you had to say, each one of you, in one sentence the

most valuable difference about using Mediasite, or the most

valuable application of it, for people who are getting

started, what do you think is the most valuable application

of Mediasite, of all the ones you talked about today?

I think that the accountability of being able

to show who's using what, and being able to see how it's

affecting change within the district, based on the numbers

that are right there, live.

Information right there.

The reporting side of it.

Where you can see who watched what, when.

How many times.

Who's on right now, just like that.

Just like I know, the Netherlands joined us even--

[UNINTELLIGIBLE]

Your most important ROI or impact?

Here is my most important thing.

Educators.

If it's good enough for Fortune 500 companies, if it's

good enough for colleges,

universities, community colleges.

If it's good enough for them, why aren't we using it?

You know, we're always reactive.

Here's a chance to be proactive, and

put this in the now.

And I know I'll have educators, I want to be the

sage on the stage, you still can.

You still can be the sage on the stage, but on video.

And guess what?

You'll have a following.

You know, you'll have 500 people that watch you, if you

want to go back and count numbers.

But I mean, it's the now.

You're already doing it.

I mean, when you're taking an online course, you are already

doing what this is all about.

And isn't it good enough for the district.

I like it.

Well, no wonder you guys have such a big following, winning

awards, and all kinds of press.

We're glad you could take time out of your busy schedule and

come all the way up to Madison.

Thank you, Scott.

Thank you, Jeff.

Thanks for the snow.

You've got to see a little of that while you're up here.

I'd like to thank the marketing team at Sonic

Foundry, and Event Services for producing this webcast.

And most of all, I'd like to thank all of you for joining

us for this live webinar.

Thank you very much, and we'll see you the next time.