Bob Fishrom, IT director at Mountain View-Los Altos Union High School District, explains how Vivi improved classroom flexibility and teacher engagement. The system integrates smoothly with existing technology, letting teachers adapt their teaching without friction.
My name is Bob Fishrom. I am the director of Information Technology for the Mountain View Los Altos High School District in Mountain View, California. This is my 4th year at MVLA and 28th year in public education where I started off as a classroom teacher. And having that unique perspective, I think makes me really passionate and understanding of what goes on in a classroom and what teachers need to be successful. The legacy system we were using before created a lot of help desk tickets because it wasn't working the way it was supposed to. So teachers were getting frustrated. We were confronted with classrooms that had HDMI connections in places where teacher desks didn't always exist long HDMI runs that often compromised the signal and the quality of the audio and video going through. And we also had challenges with mobile devices such as iPads, where IT teacher perhaps teaching math, wanted to mark up his or her iPad to show and demonstrate things to really make learning stand out more for students. They didn't have that ability. I feel that VIVI has really impacted teacher flexibility and engagement because of the flexibility it provides. If a teacher isn't tethered to a area in their classroom, behind their desk or at a podium and they want to demonstrate things on their iPad, they have the flexibility to not only project their video and audio through vivi, they have the ability to do that from anywhere in the classroom. The fact that it takes teacher is marking something up and the students are seeing this and being able to dig in and seeing how a equation or something is working there is making a difference. VIVI can really help make everything come alive and then again be in a classroom setting where you could have students sitting in more comfortable things, get out of traditional rows, you know, the more flexible environment that modern day classrooms should be. They also have the ability to allow the students to share their screens if they're using their own devices. Because VIVI lends itself to allowing all staff and student accounts be set very easily. It's making things seamless. It's less things to deal with, less points of failure overall. So keep the class flowing seamlessly. So it is my core belief that any tool we integrate, that we bring to teachers needs to work with existing services and it needs to be easy to use. So we are using VIVI throughout all classrooms at MVLA. We have 230 Vivi units in use right now. VIVI is providing them that flexibility to teach from anywhere in the classroom on any device. VIVI is definitely a tool that works. It's a tool. I can see being with our district for a long time. And I'm just really glad that this is the tool we adopted, and I'd recommend it highly to everybody.
