At its regular meeting on January 20, the Good Spirit School Division's Board of Education looked at options to enhance electronic communication within the division.
The administration has proposed equipping the board room of the Fairview Education Centre in Yorkton as a "videoconferencing endpoint" as part of upcoming renovations to the room. A camera, a network of microphones, and a server would be installed to connect the location to the outside world.
The technology could open up a number of new possibilities for the school division, beginning with the board itself. Some members have more than an hour-long commute to Yorkton which occasionally makes it difficult to attend meetings.With a videoconferencing-enabled board room, members could sign in from anywhere in the world using any computer with a microphone and webcam.
"This would allow them to attend board meetings without having to be directly on-site and still get the flavor of the meeting and be able to contribute in a meaningful way," says Director of Education Dwayne Reeve.
The board currently uses a standard speakerphone for this purpose, but the limited range of the microphone and poor quality of its audio limit its usefulness.A second application of the proposed system is professional development. Staff travel time could be reduced and seminars could be made available to a larger number of people if hosted in the board room.
Potential distance learning applications for students are further off, says Reeve. The primary limitation is internet bandwidth; the school division is over due for an upgrade which was delayed last year due to poor weather.
But in the long-term, the director says that services such as two-way communications between city classrooms and rural students are a possibility."If we get to the point during the course of this year that we know we have reliable bandwidth, then it would be something we would look at--not for the next school year, but for the one following it."
For now, the board is considering taking smaller steps. Rather than a full videoconferencing system in the board room, which would cost about $20,000, Reeve says they are likely to start with an audio-only system and screen sharing software. This will enable remote and local attendees of a meeting to view information simultaneously on their computers while discussing it as if they were in the same room.
The upgrades will be considered in the board's upcoming budget deliberations, and could be in place by the fall.
