As we’ve talked about before, Hillcrest High School in Riverside, California has state-of-the art facilities. But, it has no students. Financed with $105 million of bond money allocated in 2007, the school now lacks the $3 million it needs from the state to operate for one year. California state budget cuts of $18 billion, one-third of the state’s education funding, keep Hillcrest’s halls and classrooms empty.

In similar dire straits as California, Minnesota’s state government this summer borrowed $2.2 billion from its public schools to end a government shutdown. The state has not set a date by which to pay the schools back.

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Tags: education reform, fieldtrip, fieldtrips, IVC, school finance, TelePresence, video conferencing, videoconferencing, virtual

My name is Tom Patton, and I am a student at the University of Oregon. Presently, I support Cisco’s Education Market Management team and work on a variety of U.S. and International Marketing projects. My first project was to analyze, organize and portray data from Cisco’s recent International Education Survey. The survey is a compilation of over 1100 interviews with education officials and IT decision-makers from 15 countries. The research explores key ideas regarding education and technology.

Working on this project caused me to reflect on my own experiences with technology and our education system. This blog is the first of a two-set series that portray my experience as a student, and my opinions of the potential benefits of further utilization of technology by students and teachers alike.

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Tags: Cisco, classroom technology, education reform, Virtual Classroom

On July 19^th, the Mooresville Graded School District in North Carolina will be hosting a 3-day symposium called “Summer Connections 2011”.  The training program will detail how Mooresville took a technology initiative four years ago and transformed itself into one of the largest success stories in USA K12 public education today. The symposium will bring together superintendents, administrators, technicians, teachers – and millennial students -- all interested in learning the Mooresville recipe, and how to bring that back to their home districts.

What is the story? It’s simple, really. Two points – 1. Test score changes over the four-year period have been profound -- proving the technology initiative was wildly successful, and 2. It’s a district-wide success  story – all 8 schools have seen a significant rise in test scores. Not just a high school here or intermediate school there.  Since 2007, Mooresville district-wide dropout rates are down 20%; at the Mooresville High School graduation rates are up from 64% to 86%; District North Carolina composite scores are up from 73% to 86% in 2010, with the District arcing toward 90% in 2011. It’s now the 4^th highest achieving school district in North Carolina, even though it ranks 99^th out of the 115 state districts in school funding.

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Tags: education, education reform, education technology, K12_school_districts, transforming education

With budgets tighter than ever, school administrators are finding new ways to collaborate with other schools and districts hundreds of miles away.  Instead of spending money on flights and hotels to travel across the state and share best practices with others in their field, teachers, principals and superintendents in several California schools are now using telepresence to get that same face-to-face interaction without leaving town.

Fontana Unified School District (FUSD) in Southern California, for example, is a huge district – 41,000 students at 40 schools across 25 miles. FUSD is the latest school district to incorporate telepresence in order to offer their students the best programs possible — and not only prepare them for college, but also prepare them for the real world.  In such a large district, telepresence is a vehicle that allows the district to offer the same opportunities to every student at every school, and save time and money because administrators don’t have to travel across town for meetings.

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Tags: California, cost-savings, education reform, Fontana Unified School District, Fresno Unified School District, IVC, Long Beach Unified School District, TelePresence, videoconferencing