Colleges and universities are being challenged to transform the way they deliver their traditional roles of teaching and research. Today’s education leaders are capitalizing on new technologies to enable innovative instructional and research models that are shaping the future of higher education. Please join us on March 19 (Americas and EMEA) and March 20 (Asia-Pacific), for the Cisco Virtual Forum for Education Leaders, to hear directly from innovative educators who are at the leading edge of reinventing higher education.

With escalating travel costs and limited budgets,  professors, IT staff and administrative leaders have limited opportunities to attend global conferences. That is why Cisco is pleased to present this free global conference that higher education leaders can attend from the convenience of their desktop or mobile device.

The agenda features a breakout track dedicated to higher education, with 4 dynamic sessions by 6 distinguished speakers, that will focus on innovative strategies and practical solutions for next generation teaching and research.

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Tags: #ciscoeduforum, 21st century skills, byod, cloud, edreform, education, elearning, highered

Have you been doing your Twitter homework?

Educators are using social media to share their lesson plans and get new ideas.  If your favorite teacher is not already doing this, help them set up their Twitter account: description, photos; first tweet.

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Tags: education, social media, twitter

I am proud to be part of a company that is making innovations in education on a daily basis. You may have already heard how universities around the world are using Cisco to transform the classroom, and today’s news is further evidence of this.

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is working with Cisco to provide collaboration solutions that will bridge faculty and students in Philadelphia and San Francisco to deliver the classroom of the future. As one of the country’s most esteemed colleges, the Wharton School is using Cisco’s collaboration technologies, including Cisco TelePresence, to bridge the classrooms across the United States. In the future, they hope to extend these benefits to Wharton’s classrooms around the globe, including Asia, Europe and South America.

Most of Wharton’s star-studded professors are based in Pennsylvania and frequently travel to the San Francisco satellite campus that caters to Silicon Valley executives aiming for an MBA.  Read More »

Tags: Classroom of the Future, collaboration, connected classroom, distance learning, education, higher education, jabber, TelePresence, university of pennsylvania, video, Wharton

By Jason Kohn, Contributing Columnist

As I’ve been reading about technology in education, one of the most interesting trends that keeps popping up is gaming. As a casual gamer myself, I’ve heard the arguments about how gaming improves hand-eye coordination and problem solving and all the rest. (In fact I tried many of them with my mom when I was 12 years old)

But the arguments for gaming in education today are far more advanced and compelling than I’ve realized. A lot of very smart people are working on this subject, and a lot of innovative educators are putting it into practice.

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Tags: classroom, education, gaming, internet, learning, research, technology

Schools are facing increasing security challenges, ranging from campus violence to thefts, from vandalism to natural disasters. Abductions, Shootings, Bullying, Thefts, Vandalism, Visitor Management, Bomb threats, Fire, Earthquakes, Local Community Emergencies.

According to the respondents to the Campus Safety Magazines 2013 yearbook & survey, here are some  top challenges for schools in 2013:

• 43%  more than 2 in 5 campuses lack a visitor management system
• 39% have a video system not integrated with other systems
• 33% have radio systems that can’t interoperate with first responder from other jurisdictions
• 25% or 1 in 4  campuses do not feel prepared to respond to active shooter incidents

Higher Education and school districts often have sufficient network infrastructures to support everything they need in terms of unified collaborative safety and security applications on the network including video surveillance, electronic access controls and incident management.

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Tags: education, higher education, safety, security, video surveillance