Cisco sets girls' school on steep learning curve

One of the first cabs off the rank was Cisco’s “Show and Share” system for the sharing of educational video content to improve teaching and learning.

It allows teachers to build secure libraries of learning content and to create communities allowing students to share ideas, while also enabling the creation, publishing, editing and appraisal of videos.

Complementing Show and Share, Cisco Digital Media signage facilitates a richer collaborative experience between students and teachers, combining a broad range of materials. Communications are delivered instantly and in a way which is scalable up and down.

It also ensures teachers and staff are up-to-date with the latest training resources.

Deployed last month, Cisco Quad is a collaboration platform that will bring students together to share ideas and content, collaborate on projects, and interact using chat, voice or video, regardless of where people are located.

It enables teachers to create virtual working groups, with students sharing similar interests able to locate and talk to each other via chat or video conference while also sharing data files, video and other digital materials.

Phase two of the deployment saw the addition of Cisco telepresence, which combines high-quality video and audio to provide a virtual meeting experience replete with direct eye contact, body language and other features of direct physical communication.

Moreover telepresence is expected to help students access a much broader range of teaching and other professionals, both in Australia and abroad, given its ability to essentially beam people between telepresence nodes.

“It has already been used to link students with experts in the field, including a virtual meeting with NASA,” notes Suresh, adding that telepresence is also expected to become commonly used system for facilitating inter-school debating.

Also coming on stream later this year are Cisco Unified Communications and Cisco Unified Computing System supporting advanced voice services with telephony, paging, voicemail, applications for broadcast messaging and parental notification and more.

Suresh expects this will lead to lower overall cost of ownership, increased agility as well as investment surety once the various communication systems are virtualised within a next- generation, integrated data centre.