Appearing in EdTech K-12

Story by Julie Sturgeon, Photo by Max S Gerber

As principal at Chaparral High School, Lucia Washburn no longer dreads lockdowns.

Each year, the Grossmont Union High School District requires each facility to conduct two such emergency drills. Officials sound a special alarm, and students must get to the nearest room that has a door or that locks. Teachers practice keeping students safe in that secure space, and the El Cajon police officers check every room to make sure the campus is secure. The entire process lasts an average of 10 minutes — but for Washburn, it was 10 minutes of frustration because her building had no public address system. Instead, she communicated with teachers over telephone speakers.

“If the class was a bit loud, they couldn’t hear anything,” she notes.

In the fall of 2005, Jack Blaylock, director of technical serv­ices at this San Diego, Calif.-area district, selected Chaparral to investigate a new IP telecom system under consideration. Singlewire (formerly Berbee) billed its InformaCast product as a robust, full-featured system that allows users to simultaneously push an audio stream and/or a text message to multiple Internet Protocol phones and speakers. The Madison, Wis., manufacturer originally built the system for the Department of Commerce after personnel there found themselves banging on doors on 9/11 in an effort to evacuate a building without loudspeakers.

Of course, Blaylock wasn’t willing to invest in new switches, speakers and software for one building; he had a bigger challenge on his hands. The 19 campuses in this high school district handed him a mixed bag of four or five different notification systems. “Some of it, I don’t know if there’s a brand name on it because it goes back 50 years [to] when the school was built,” he says.

The variety alone meant a lot of downtime for the maintenance department as it struggled to stock the right parts to keep each independent intercom system, bell scheme and clock working. And then it was nearly impossible to keep any two clocks within a high school in sync with each other — one class would pack up early waiting on the bell while another was caught by surprise. “They were all in really bad shape, so it was the prime time to catch up with the standards,” Blaylock reports. “IP basically rolled all three areas into one.”

Today, the announcement system is an enterprise that allows users to contact any combination of schools simultaneously. Because each intercom carries an IP address, officials narrow their message as specifically as the math department at one, two, three or all the high schools.

“Anyone with the code can make an emergency broadcast from any telephone in the school,” Blaylock notes. Users can also send a text-only update flagged by an unobtrusive audible alert, so administrators can sidestep starting a schoolwide panic over the speakers, says Ken Bywaters, director of voice products at Singlewire.

IP Telecom Made Sense

Grossmont Union High School District began converting to an IP structure in 2000, starting with phones and then adding security cameras. Because Blaylock built the network using Optical Carrier OS3s between the school and his servers, bandwidth wasn’t an issue. “It made it very easy, when a product like this came along, to put it on our network,” he says. “We didn’t have to go out and buy a bunch of equipment and make a drastic change. It was just a matter of adding more ports.”

The district also had another advantage already in place. Back in 1990, administrators ran fiber underground between the buildings to avoid shutting down entire campuses in case of lightning strikes, electrical surges and other problems. It has enhanced the infrastructure over time, running new fibers for faster speed on the data network, and reducing as many as 10 conduits to four.

Still, architects working on building renovations relied on yesterday’s features from names they already knew — Dukane, Rauland-Borg — to create the bid specifications. They were solid products, Blaylock knew from his research, but in the end the district would wind up paying for duplicate features using that route. For instance, the IP phones covered the same needs as a two-way intercom system did.

“And you still had to go to the local call box and have wires run to the cabinet,” he says. Those wires usually ran along the roof, where Mother Nature rotted away the elements. Blaylock estimates that 30 percent to 40 percent of the analog speakers in some of his schools no longer work.

So what Singlewire suggested was tempting, “but it was new,” he adds. “What if it doesn’t do everything it says it will? What’s the turnaround on parts if something breaks? How quickly can we get service to it here on the West Coast?” played like a drumbeat in his head. He called a colleague at Rialto (Calif.) Unified School District whom he knew through the California Educational Technology Professional Association for a heart-to-heart conversation on the district’s satisfaction with InformaCast, and decided it was at least worth a pilot test at Chaparral.

The system’s cost was an issue for Blaylock. “The speakers were more expensive than I’m used to paying. But even when you took that price and the licensing fees and add it all together versus the infrastructure costs to go with the traditional system, I was out in front. Once we had some of those numbers put together, it started making more and more sense.”

Testing … One, Two, Three

On the other hand, Grossmont Union did need to make a few up-front network investments. True, the district already enjoyed Optical Carrier 3s’ 155-megabits-per-second lines running between the school campuses and Blaylock’s department at the district’s headquarters. But because it built its IP network more than five years ago, it met 5e standards that have changed when it comes to switching for Power Over Ethernet. In a nutshell, Blaylock needed to purchase one new Cisco switch to run power ports to the equipment. Happily, the InformaCast system needs no electrical plug because it is fed right from the data switch.

The initial installation was a no-brainer. The district had two possibilities to choose from: set a server at the site or run the entire operation from the district headquarters. Blaylock chose the first because “if anything happens at the office, you don’t want to take down everyone’s communication system. When you get more than 10 schools wide, you don’t want headquarters to be the weak point,” he says. So he bought an enterprise license from Berbee, set up a server at Chaparral, installed the InformaCast software, and then tied that server back to his main server.

His team spent a week getting the hardware into place and then another month fine-tuning the configurations and adjusting speaker volumes in each classroom. And after the initial configuration, the clocks suddenly quit. Turns out, the IT department assumed the settings rather than seeking the manufacturer’s recommendations, which caused a problem in the software. Thankfully, the proper configurations righted the gaffe.

Blaylock admits the next rollout should be faster now that they’ve worked out these bugs, although other high schools will offer a challenge — to amplify football fields and other outdoor areas that 350-student Chaparral High School doesn’t offer.

Since then, school administrators have made their own tweaks. They prerecorded the lockdown message so that if they’re ever in the midst of a real emergency, Washburn can activate it by pushing two phone buttons.

Police department feedback during lockdowns resulted in Chaparral posting periodic updates during the drill to give teachers a sense of what’s happening outside their darkened classrooms. During spring break in 2007, the local SWAT team used Chaparral as a training ground for its officers, and suggested school administrators run the emergency announcement on a continuous loop.

IP allowed them to incorporate everyone’s advice with ease. According to Blaylock, schools can program an entire year’s worth of class dismissal bells and drills online in one sitting. Changing a date is no more complicated than using an e-mail program, in his opinion — just log into the software, type the change and close the program. Washburn is of a different mind. Using the system to make an announcement is “super simple” in her experience, but as a nontechnical person, she votes for a training session to get users comfortable with the change order process.

But even easy isn’t fail proof, as Washburn learned when a fire broke out in the high school’s kitchen in the fall of 2005. The principal wanted to inform students the fire department was on its way and maintain updates throughout the drama, but instead accidentally tapped into the phone system’s Muzak loop, playing elevator music to the waiting teens.

“Which, of course, is the worst music they could hear,” she laughs. Washburn made up for it by using the IP telecom to pipe Pirates of the Caribbean music throughout the building during a special celebration this spring.

Read More of this article at EdTech K-12

Founded in 1896 in Pasadena, California, Lake Avenue Church has grown to occupy six multistory buildings on a campus that spans half a city block, plus two nearby residential offices. Approximately 150 staff members and volunteers work together on worship services, educational programs, community and global outreach, and small groups centered around life stages, shared interests, and common needs.

Staff members on the sprawling church campus rely on the communications system to collaborate with each other and communicate with members. When the old private branch exchange (PBX) system began to fail, the IT staff looked for a new communications system.

Lake Avenue Church plans to gradually introduce more features that increase the value of the Cisco Unified
Communications platform. “We give staff a chance to become comfortable with one new feature before we introduce
the next,” says Tulcan. “Cisco Unified Communications is very simple, so new features don’t take long to learn.”
Plans under consideration include:

• Enhanced safety: When someone places a 911 call from any location on campus, the public safetyanswering point receives the building and floor location, not just the church’s main address. “If someone calls from the third floor of our Family Life building, the paramedics don’t have to spend the time to search 240,000 square feet of building space to find the caller,” Tulcan says.
• Emergency preparedness: The church can send pages through the IP phones using InformaCast software from Singlewire Software, a Cisco developer network partner.

Read Full Case Study at http://www.cisco.com.kz/en/US/prod/collateral/voicesw/ps6788/vcallcon/ps7273/case_study_c36-547629.pdf – PDF

Located in the heart of Orange County, California, Los Alamitos Unified School District (LAUSD) has always believed in high standards for its staff, faculty, administrators, and students. District officials rely heavily on collaboration and communication tools to generate quality education and growth potential opportunities to meet the needs of its students. In particular, LAUSD strives to build partnerships with the leading technology providers to supply the support and resources needed for its students to achieve academic excellence and develop unique talents in
preparation for their future goals.

LAUSD had an outdated network and was unable to communicate effectively with key stakeholders, including the parents of its students. With the support of the community, the LAUSD Board of Education implemented a three-year Technology Use Plan to achieve its next level of technology-based curriculum. The plan called for a revamp of the  entire network infrastructure, incorporating a solution that would enable all schools within the district to  communicate general announcements, individual student related information, and emergency broadcasts to parents quickly and efficiently.

LAUSD turned to Cisco and its partners, SchoolMessenger and Singlewire, to accomplish its goals, moving from a decentralized to a centralized solution that provided a robust notification system for all of its schools to utilize across the district.

Download the full press release. – PDF

Read more about the Notifi-Ed Solution from Cisco.

Read Written Version | Watch Additional Video Interview Footage

The Challenge

Culmination of comprehensive crisis management planning involved the need for a stable emergency notification system that could access multiple locations quickly and provide continuity in the notification process

The Solution

Implementation of InformaCast paging software that, in conjunction with the Desktop Notification System, and SchoolMessenger, allows contact across campuses through IP phones and speakers, legacy paging systems, computer desktops, SMS text messaging,and email

The Benefits

• Cross-campus, “one-click” notification for speed and consistency of messages
• Control over who can access and send messages, integrated with Active Directory
• Easily scalable to diverse environments
• Able to broadcast to different technologies, including overhead IP speakers, IP phones, desktops, legacy paging systems, and (with SchoolMessenger) email

Read and Watch additional information on this case study.

Transcript from Video

DR. JAY BOX:  Kentucky Community and Technical College System was formed back in 1998.
Today we have grown to sixteen comprehensive community and technical colleges with 67 campuses across the state of Kentucky.

BOB HAMMONDS: There are no dorms at any of our campuses.
We do not have dormitories.
So, all of our students commute.
Several of our students due to the nature of their colleges and remote locations travel up to an hour, an hour and a half each way to attend class on a daily basis.
Five years ago is about the time we started our, our overall crisis management process.
The culmination of this process has been the implementation of a emergency notification system.

DERREL CONE:  We have the ability with our Voice Over IP phone to hit a services button and it brings up a menu and we can choose the message.
This is a pre created, pre recorded, pre scripted message and we can choose that message right there by hitting a button.
And then we can choose what group we want to send it to.
This campus, or that campus, or all of our campuses.
We have the ability right then and there to send that message.
So, if it’s a critical message and  seconds count, we can make it happen.

Snap is the name we’ve given our emergency notification system here at KCTCS.
The system goes immediately to about 8,000 or so Voice Over IP phones.
It can go to desktop computers.
And also we’re tied into a text messaging which gets out thousands of messages in minutes.

InformaCast does what we consider internal messaging.
It sends to the internal phone, the internal PA’s, the internal IP speakers, the desktops on our campus.
SchoolMessager is our external component.
It sends out SMS tags to anybody who have signed up for the SMS tags.
It sends out the emails to anybody who signed up for the emails.
Well when you send out an infomaCast message, we have the script.
And then what that message does is goes out, logs in to the school messenger, runs a pre created job with SchoolMessengerand then does what we asked it for.
We can hit that one button and then it does it all.

BOB HAMMONDS:  It’s something that’s used much more frequent than we anticipated.
We knew we had emergencies and we knew things went on.
But since we’ve implemented the system it has been phenomenal.

DR. JAY BOX:  We have several testimonials from our students talking about what a great concept this has been.
They love the idea of the quick notification.
Plus from the safety prospective it’s, it’s that feeling more secure.
That when an incident does happen, we have a process now in place that can notify our employers and our students in case of that emergency.

BOB HAMMONDS:  One person’s life is worth much, much, much more than what we’ve invested in this system.
The comfort that it gives a person in my role as being Director of Crisis Management for this system is I know we can’t prevent things from happening.
But I feel comfortable at night knowing that if something happens tomorrow we’re going to be able to alert people, let them know what’s going on and potentially save lives.
And for me the cost is . . . the benefits far out weighs any cost we have incurred.

Transcript of Video

TYVIAN TEMPLE: Within the BAA organization, we have about 900 sort of affiliates that work, that work within this area. That

ranges from you know, small retail outlets through to obviously, the major airlines themselves, BA, BMI, all the normal sort

of faces that you’d expect to see in an airport campus.

NIGEL WARBURTON: BAA have been in the process of replacing their IP network throughout the airport to a new standard that fits

best practice within the whole  marketplace. Full three layer model, lots of security.

EMMA CORNISH: If for instance the package belt goes down or there’s an urgent message that we need to pass across to all

staff, something to do with a particular flight or an issue that has arisen due to weather problems here at London Heathrow or

around the network. We also use it as a communications device to different departments and different staff members around the

terminal itself.

TYVIAN TEMPLE: From a voice systems point of view specifically, obviously the return on investment has already been apparent

with the Cisco IPT backbone. What it has enabled us to do is create one support model. In the past, the Legacy systems, we had

a dedicated PBX that provided paging and broadcast alongside the main house switch. In the new, and that was two help desks,

two support groups, and two different types of engineers that would come and support it. What we have now is obviously the

converged network, data and voice; we have our Cisco platform, and we have the InformaCast product nestled in that support

model. So we have one help desk, one number, and one set of engineers all trained for each one of those products. Makes it

much easier for the user community and obviously, it saves costs long run for BAA.

NIGEL WARBURTON: Naturally, you know security is a big concern. Having looked through the architecture, you know, separately,

with the InformaCast solution it does provide real security the way it can hop between ports, whether it can hop between

addresses, really does fit quite in my technical space.

TYVIAN TEMPLE: From a handover point of view, all the areas that we’ve now rolled out InformaCast to who’ve been accepted the

following day with absolutely zero snags to date that relate to the InformaCast product.

EMMA CORNISH: The staff have actually really enjoyed the new product. They enjoyed learning how to use it and also the fact

that it’s a lot better than the old [upstall] that they used to use. So it has been received really well. We didn’t have any

official training on it, but we found that the leaflets on the side of the phone have actually helped the staff with

everything they need to know in order to make or receive any communication calls, and it’s been fantastic.

TYVIAN TEMPLE: A nice product to work is one that goes through the design phase nice and simply. It’s capable of adapting to

some change in user requirements because user requirements at the start of a project and are never the same as they are at the

end; and you need the ability to change things or tweak things. We can provide multiple different types of presentation and

how people use their groups. So, we have one airline that has their groups very much displayed differently because that’s how

they’re used to using that product; where we can standardize all the others. So, it gives us a lot of flexibility. So from my

point of view, a product that can go through design without snags, come out design and go into implementation and be flexible;

and it delivers what it says on the tin, I think the InformaCast product has done that for me, which is really a nice app to

work with.

Read Brandeis Case Study (PDF)

Brandeis University, a leading university outside of Boston with a total student enrollment of approximately 6,000 and about 1,000 faculty members.

In the wake of the tragedy at Virginia Tech in April 2007, universities across the country were confronted with the need for an improved method of all-campus communication. Brandeis University didn’t waste any time.Their Crisis Communications Team immediately began to seek out the best solution for their campus.

John Turner, Brandeis’ Director of Networks and Systems remembers that parents were asking a lot of questions: “What are you doing for communication? How are you going to let us know? How are you going to let our son or daughter know in case of a crisis? What other mechanisms do you have?”

As additional analysis of the Virginia Tech occurrence became available, reports and assessments pointed to the critical nature of a public address, or PA, system. Brandeis had recently deployed approximately 5,000 Cisco IP phones across the campus. Dormitory rooms, for example, had been equipped with one phone per resident, providing an ideal foundation for PA messaging. For this reason, says Turner, “We pretty much looked at InformaCast from day one.” The Crisis Communications Team realized that with nearly all the major components already in place, they could effectively implement InformaCast with minimal cost and no system disruption.

“The surprise in implementation of the system,” notes Turner, “was the ease of doing it. It was: download the software, get a license key, get a server, point it at our CallManager infrastructure, and we were done. We were up and running in, really, I would say less than
four hours.”

Read Case Study (PDF)

San Ramon Valley Unified School District (SRVUSD) encompasses the California communities of Alamo, Danville, Diablo, Blackhawk, and SanRamon as well as a small portion of the cities of Walnut Creek and Pleasanton. It is comprised of 28 schools serving more than 21,000 students in Kindergarten through Grade 12.

The Situation SRVUSD was experiencing rapid growth and needed to modernize many aging schools. These needs led to the construction of eight new schools and the complete modernization of ten more.

Facing construction cost inflation, SRVUSD was looking for ways to migrate to a district-wide telephone system and improve its school low voltage communications systems without exceeding its already-strained budgets.

To capture substantial cost savings, San Ramon Valley began implementing a ‘one-wire’ solution. They no longer used seperate wires for phone, data, and speaker systems. Rather, they ran the entire infrastructure on ‘one-wire’, providing significant costs savings, easy administration, and a very modern platform that is easy to expand.