Today Crockett Elem. had the pleasure of experiencing their first virtual field trip with Greenbush IDL in Kansas. They learned about the rain forest & animals in the rain forest.
I continue to stress to district officials that the BNI carts are inadequate. These pictures demonstrate some of the differences in quality between our BNI units and Polycoms.
The top three pictures is the field trip utilizing the BNI cart and the second three is the same field trip but on a Polycom. There is a huge difference in the quality of the picture & audio in these two units. We also had to physically change the settings in the BNI cart to H261 to connect to Greenbush. The BNI carts also don't handle the packet loss as well as the Polycoms. The BNI cart was only able to call out to Greenbush whereas Greenbush could call into the Polycoms. Most content providers prefer to iniate the conference but they made an exception and let us call into them. With the BNI cart the teacher had to run around with the microphone to each student whereas the Polycoms have onmi - directional mics which can be muted and un-muted from a remote control.Now, which field trip looks better to you?
2 comments:
Wow! I have never seen it compared like that. That is what video looked like on some of our old VTEL units.
You are so right on the mics...we did a session last week when Rusty connected to a group that had 60 students in the room and we could hear them just fine when they stood and asked their questions to us. :-)
See you in June!
The bottom images do look better. I'm curious, what is the price difference between the units? Does the district currently buy both? How do you happen to have two different systems? I'm new to your blog, so I'm not sure about the background of your systems.
Thanks
Ann
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