VCC has been helping businesses gain market visibility and access through
effective use of the web. The growth of e-commerce offers strong predictions for businesses to direct thoughtful and timely investment of human and capital resources. E-commerce solutions should be carefully adapted to your specific business needs. Sites should be designed to allow expansion and growth, because constantly evolving web capabilities make new methods available that may not have been imagined when your site was developed.
Web Office
Businesses need to position themselves to help their managers and workers become effective contributors to innovation using the web. The server housing your site can be utilized for far more than just giving the public access to your company's web pages. Through password protected addresses, documents, data, and even complete presentations can be housed on your web site available only to you.
- Web-Basd Presentations... Doing a presentation where you can call up and display pre-prepared or real time materials that are housed at your private web address is easy. You needn't scurry around trying to get the latest materials loaded onto your notebook computer to take with you. In fact, you can give your presentation from any computer linked to the web.
- Centrally updated materials for field staff... Providing uniformly updated materials to field staff is a breeze. Since materials are housed at a central location (your web site), all users can have access to continually updated materials from any location.
- Your newsletter emailed...from anywhere! Using templates and a mailing program you can bring your business to the attention of a targeted audience. There is no doubt that a certain article of interest to a specific audience will get many of them clicking into your site to find out more.
The possibilities are endless, exciting and very efficient! Contact us and let us discuss them with you.
Business/Organization Efficiency
If your workers can increase efficiency through employing new methods available through improved software and hardware usage, why not encourage them!
- Software new usage training... Spending some money on software and training can empower staff to produce much or all of the materials your business uses. It can increase staff efficiency, reduce outside printing costs, and encourage staff technological innovation.
- Hardware add-ons for new horizons... Often just a $200 piece of hardware can bring increased functionality to your computer investment and let your business move into new growth opportunities.
School, Teacher, Student Web Pages:
Schools now have the opportunity to gear up for the tremendous educational possibilities that sharing and collaboration through the web can provide them. There are are many opportunities to use the incredible potential this medium has to offer virtually any area of education. However, in some areas use policies lag behind potential and may be hampering development and new use experimentation.
Ethical Concerns:
Schools and teachers are under tight budgets. Teachers are often new to the use of computer software and, as a result, many are relatively unaware of the serious nature of copyright infringement when they try to make a single license support many computers. While this practice may remain relatively invisible within a single classroom, publishing to the web makes copyright and licencing highly visible to the world. It is also vital to inform these people of security concerns pertaining to student names and pictures when publishing on a web site.
Where Schools and Teachers Stand Technologically:
With the full schedule, planning, and the large numbers of students that teachers must work with daily, it is difficult for most to devote additional time to becoming productive with technology. Yet this is what schools need in order to have their programs truly adapt to current and future job skill and higher education demands. Most teachers lack the confidence and understanding to really use computer technology as a daily teaching tool. They quickly learn that when they try something new with a computer, it rarely happens without numerous glitches. This can be especially true for teachers trying to teach from the computer, using it to demonstrate concepts, or having students use computers to accomplish similar things themselves. In order for teachers to fully integrate computer technology into their teaching methodologies, they must become proficient and confident users themselves. A small percentage of teachers are comfortable innovators, adapting to working out technological problems. Most, however, will adopt technology only if they know it contains a package that is complete, tested and ready to use. For the majority that aren't innovators and technological problem solvers, reluctance to put themselves in a situation where they must depend on it is only natural. This acceptance problem is especially crucial as schools begin to encourage teachers to explore using the Web as a major delivery vehicle for course content. Teachers need to be shown how multimedia and web page production can become part of course content curriculum. This amounts to a new paradigm for most teachers -- that full technology integration into curricula both requires and allows for a different method of content introduction and development, as well as the development of new authentic assessment modes in order to meet current content standards within traditional time constraints.
What is Needed:
The issue of content standards and benchmarks follow teachers today whenever they search for a new text, and each year when testing scores are published. Computer technology, properly applied to interactive and online lesson production, can help provide many solutions to the problem of aligning course materials to accepted benchmarks. Most textbooks are essentially a static document with little effort given to real alignment issues. Teachers are the experts in understanding what their students really need in order to be successful within given benchmarks, but many lack sufficient understanding of technology's power to think within this new paradigm. Teachers need to be asked to step out of their current teaching mode and to start to "think digital while acting analog."1 Interactive materials on the web and multimedia authoring software can finally empower them to produce exactly what they need with a very specific focus to precisely meet such benchmarks.
Training with multimedia, video, web production software, ethical issues, and administrator awareness are needed on a regular basis. Such training could take the form of regularly scheduled inservice, enabling teachers and administrators to lessen the need for additional time commitments. Many schools as yet have not begun to design such scheduled training time blocks, except in short and infrequent small informational presentations.
Design and Scheduling Needs:
School administrations and staff must step outside of their current scheduling methods and devise one that allow for peer mentoring. Daily scheduling needs to let strong users of technology assist reluctant users without adding to their workload. A nearby and responsive source of help can ultimately convince reluctant users that they can learn technical skills on their own.
As new technological skills are introduced, it is important to emphasize their strategic place within the recognized content standards. Performance on the state's assessment program is an important driving force for school administrations. All content areas of workshops and peer mentoring should be able to show the ways in which teacher participation will lend itself to improved assessment scores for students. Fortunately, technology is ideally suited to using content standards to drive the development of lesson materials and software.
Where does Your School Stand Technologically?
- Are the computers in your school being utilized to their fullest capability? Utilizing computers fully can begin to replace textbooks in many curriculum areas.
- Is administrator technological preparedness at a level to provide the vision that staff need? Administrators are undoubtedly the force that sets the educational expectations within each building.
- Is your school in competition with other schools in your area? Innovative and sophisticated integration of technology into curriculum gives a competitive edge.
- Are summer technology workshops enough? Teachers need be able to use and experiment with what they've learned in workshops immediately, or much of the time and money spent is wasted. This requires coordinated and year-round support for their home and school computers so that they can carry on with what they learned.
- Lots of money has been spent on hardware, but little on training and support. Of a district's technology expenditure, at least 25% should be used for staff development.
Administrators Learning How to Integrate Technology:
Administrators create the all-important climate and expectations for teachers in their buildings. By learning some of these technology skills, administrators will be better prepared to offer the leadership schools need to make the next real advances in technology integration.
