Education Beyond the Classroom- Adopting Webex in Schools

Teachers are amazing. They inspire the students who pass through their doors to dream big and work hard to pursue their goals.

Impactful teachers with kind hearts, open ears, and bright ideas have formed who I am, and continue to inspire next generations. At Cisco, teachers have continued to be our inspiration. We’ve turned to them to discover the next great ideas for how Webex can be used to bridge geographic gaps, make collaboration simpler, and take education beyond the classroom.

A few weeks ago, our Cisco Webex team attended the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference, excited to listen and learn from teachers about their dreams for using technology in the classroom to bring material to life. Educators of all kinds had ideas for using Webex collaboration technology like:

1. Bringing Remote Experts Into The Classroom
• Imagine being a geometry teacher, and inviting your neighbor who’s an architect to virtually speak to students from their workshop?
2. Classroom Collaboration Between Students
• What if students could work together in group chatrooms for projects, like so many do in the business world?
3. Taking Students (And Parents) On Virtual Field Trips
• What if a classroom (and parents) could visit the great barrier reef, without airplanes and wavers?

These teachers were dreaming BIG about how to expand the imaginations and experiences of their students in new ways. Our goal at Cisco is to enable educators’ dreams of bringing their classrooms to the next level. With technologies like Webex, classroom collaboration isn’t bound by geographies anymore.

Getting Started with Webex

So, how do schools or school districts get started? We’re preparing the tools needed create a buzz, to help people like instructional technologists, instructional designers, IT, or technology leaders drive innovation. Let me introduce the Webex for Schools Adoption Toolkit.

This is a guidebook full of the best strategies, guidance, and tools you need to help get teachers, administrators, parents, and students started with Webex. Check it out for yourself! I’ll break down some of my favorite tools for helping teachers accomplish the three classroom collaboration dreams above:

Bring remote experts into the classroom When teachers are enabled to think outside of the 4 walls of their classrooms, possibilities are endless. When it comes to inspiring teachers with what technology could do in their classroom, the first place teachers often go to get started is Pinterest. Following asks from teachers, we have Pinterest-like worksheets to help your teacher brainstorm ways to take their classroom to the next level, like “Top 6 ways to bring your students out of the classroom while staying in the classroom.”

Classroom Collaboration The #1 goal of many teachers and admins is to enable students to work together to solve problems for themselves. It’s important to teach students critical thinking skills, and also what it means to be a responsible digital citizen. The Webex For Schools Adoption Toolkit has worksheets to help teach students how to get started. There are lesson plans to help teachers facilitate group work among students. Check out fun items too like bookmarks to remind the students how to be most successful with technology.

Virtual field trips One of the ultimate ways to see a “lightbulb” in a child’s eyes, is to take them somewhere they never thought possible. Virtual field trips allow you to bring students out of the classroom for a fraction of the cost (often even free!). We want to make setting up these experiences simple for teachers, so we put it into their language- Lesson plans. Check out lesson plans like these that help teachers focus on managing the classroom experience, picking the right virtual field trip, and allow the technology fade into the background

Bonus! Get parents on board by inviting them to a virtual field trip on parents’ night, so they see the value too!

The new classroom possibilites are endless, but as with all great changes, a plan is needed for the most effective “Boom!”. Before you get started deploying Webex to teachers, there’s some key steps to take first to prepare for the smoothest adoption efforts possible. We want to help you plan logistics like change management and promotion, by sharing with you what we’ve learned from the most successful education systems we’ve worked with.

Check out our video about Adopting Webex in Education from Cisco Live US where we share the best tips and tricks for getting started:

Learning from the world’s best teachers about their dreams for their classrooms continues to inspire every technology we build and create at Cisco.

I want to ask you, do you have any dreams of how you could bring technology into a classroom? Or maybe ways you could enable educators to take teaching to the next level?
I’d love to hear in the comments section!

For all those in education reading this, I just want to take a moment to thank you, for everything you do to teach next generations, to help them collaborate, learn and grow to do amazing things.

Enthuse and empower with your toolkit for successful Webex adoption in Education

Learn more:

Will Gen Z become Gen C? The case for collaboration