 It's all right, it's all right, it's all right. It's all right, it's all right. We had an error. Thank you. It's all right. It's all right. It's all right. It's all right. It's all right. It's all right. It's all right. It's all right. It's all right. Do you have that thumb drive, that psychedelic thumb drive? I can do that. I think I've got another one. I can do that. This one. Can you hear that? I'm just going to stand up here, but Dennis, you're going to come up here with me. Okay, if everyone can take a seat, I think we're going to get started. So good afternoon everyone, welcome. I'm Jill Jemison. I'm the technical leader for BTV Ignite and the CIO for Health Sciences at UVM. UVM Larner College of Medicine is really pleased to be hosting this event. We're thrilled because we've made a huge commitment to technology enhanced learning. If you've read the national media or the local media, we're going to an all active learning curriculum by 2019. We're going to finish our transition. So lecture halls like this will probably be going the way of the dinosaur soon. We'll be in one of our active learning flat floor classrooms later this afternoon when we move to the active portion of this. We have an exciting lineup of speakers today. A couple of housekeeping notes. You'll see signs to the bathrooms. So just out the door down left, left, and you'll find it. There is a tornado warning for Burlington because you can never, you know, we can't have nice things is what it comes down to here. But we will have, luckily the university has contingencies for almost anything, including tornadoes. So we'll be have, there'll be instructions on what to do in the, in the very unlikely event that there is a tornado. So we're thrilled. Welcome. So let's turn this off to our executive director for BTV Ignite, Dennis Moynihan, to tell you about our day. Good afternoon or evening. Thanks Jill, and thanks for hosting us. And thank you everybody for coming out. I know that by scheduling it on a Friday afternoon that added a bit of challenge to people's agendas, but I really appreciate it. And Silver, you said that you're excited about this, and we're really excited to have this opportunity to launch today the BTV Ignite Reverse Pitch Competition and give our innovators and our creators a chance to apply their talent and their imagination to the opportunity for how we deliver education. And as Jill said, we have a series of great folks here to talk about that, both from a technical perspective and from an educator's perspective. And the goal is to give you stuff to think about, to talk about the opportunities we have and the creativity. How do we bring 21st century technology to the exciting but the challenging role of delivering education from K to 12, even into higher education. The presentations will be relatively fast paced. I've told everyone I'm bringing along my little whip to make sure people stay on schedule, but mostly because we have pizza coming in a little bit. Nobody wants cold pizza. And the goal, a little bit about the format today is we're just going to do the conversations for the first half of this session so that we can give you different perspectives on the opportunity. And then we're going to just catch our breath, pivot to another room where people can sit together and ask more extended Q&A and also let the experts kind of be there to compare notes with you. Because this is a great chance to have these folks in the room with us. A little bit about a reverse pitch and then where this goes from here. Many of you, particularly if you're in business or an entrepreneur, you may have been in a situation where you've done a pitch. You're trying to explain something you've created or a product or you're talking to a potential investor. Usually you have an idea and you're trying to explain it to somebody. A reverse pitch is an idea that has been particularly promoted by U.S. Ignite. And we'll introduce Scott Turnbull, the technical lead from U.S. Ignite in a few moments. But the reverse pitch flips that around. The idea is that we bring a number of stakeholders to a room to lay out a challenge to the developer and innovator community and let them come up with creative solutions to that challenge. And that challenge could be smart city stuff. It could be, for all you know, fintech. In our case, the challenge is how do we reimagine the delivery of education. And, you know, what we're looking for are digital solutions, technical solutions, which we often call high bandwidth or gigabit applications. But we're looking for solutions that allow you to use the Internet in creative ways in the classroom. And that may be augmented reality or virtual reality. It may be telepresence. It may be making access to educational resources that are not local. It may be allowing students to co-create. It may be allowing teachers to co-teach across geographies. And breaking down geographies is one of the important things we're interested in. How can you do interesting things here in Burlington? How can Burlington and other school districts across Vermont collaborate and share resources? And how can Vermonters reach out to resources that are across the nation and the world? And that's really what we hope will stimulate some of the ideas around today. Now, the idea of the reverse pitch, many of you might have been involved in a hackathon before. And this is kind of like a long-term slow-motion hackathon. A hackathon is great, but if you know the format, it usually means that you come for a weekend. You lay out a challenge, and then there's an awful lot of soda and coffee and pizza. And you do the best you can creating an idea, but it's the best you can do in a three-day span. And a lot of times that's where the ideas stop because people go back to their day job. The idea of the reverse pitch, the way we're going to do this is spread it out just a little bit further. And so we're launching today, and then over the next several weeks, we hope people will begin to come up with creative ideas. And we're going to have an idea pitch event shortly, and I'll come back to the logistics, but we're going to have an idea pitch event where we want individuals or teams to come back and say, we thought about everything you told us, and here's what we'd like to create. Here's how we'd like to solve a problem, what problem we'd like to solve. And the top five ideas are going to receive a grant to take that forward. And assuming we get five ideas and things go forward, the idea would be that each presenter that we choose will receive a grant probably in the range of $2,000 to take their idea further. And then in the fall, September or October timeframe, we're going to have a final event. And the best two ideas, the best two proof of concept solutions that are presented at that time will receive a much larger grant to further complete what they're working on, and those grants will be in the range of $10,000. So what we're working on as opposed to a hackathon is actually trying to help you not just come up with a great idea, but take that idea further in terms of development towards the marketplace. And one of the reasons we want to do that is U.S. Ignite, which is one of the co-sponsors of this, works with 25 gigabit cities across the nation, and they want to take the best ideas that we create and help other communities pick those up and use them. And vice versa, they're sharing ideas from other communities with Burlington and with Vermont so that we can take advantage of that. So a couple things on the logistics. The grant funding available, as you've seen in many, many, many, many emails, is up to $30,000, and that's reflecting a significant grant from U.S. Ignite. And also, I'd like to thank our friends at Burlington Telecom, and Stephen Barraclough has just come in and got a glass of water, and he's the general manager for Burlington Telecom. Is that your title, Stephen? Soon to be at this channel. Well, soon, there you go. And also, the Vermont Department Agency of Community Development, Commerce and Community Development, and Nick Grimley is here today representing them. So they've also contributed to this because driving education is very important. In terms of the logistics, I mentioned that in about six weeks we'll have the idea thing. I have a real reason why I don't have a date for that, and I have a strategic reason why I don't have a date for that. The real reason is I'm still nailing down the logistics, so I don't actually have all the nuts and bolts together. That's the honest answer. But also, too, I wanted to see what questions and what feedback came out of today's session, so we can kind of understand if people had any challenges, how people might be thinking about taking their ideas forward. So that's a little bit about the program. In the second half of the session today, after the conversations are over here, the presentations, you will have a chance to join the substarrers. You don't have to stay for the entire window. But I'll be available, and many of the speakers will be available, to deep dive in any questions or further information you have. And also, too, you've probably seen on email, my email address, Dennis, at btvignite.com. Also, my website. Please feel free to reach out with any thoughts, questions, ideas, anything you need following today's session. So I hope that gets us kicked off. I want to thank everybody for coming, particularly, again, on a Friday afternoon. And I'm glad it's not too sunny outside because then you'd really feel bad being inside. But thank you again. And with that, I'm going to move to the speakers. And our first speaker who's going to present, we're so pleased to have Mickey Arconi here from Microsoft. And Mickey, I'll let you describe your role with Microsoft. You can do better than I. But he's come all the way from Seattle today to be here and to speak with you. And it's the start of, hopefully, a continuing relationship to do more together around our innovator community. Mickey, I'll leave it with you. Thank you, Dennis. So this is the guy I speak to you. Hi, everyone. I'm Mickey. I work for Microsoft in the Cloud and AI division. And I heard about this initiative from Julie who sits here. And I think it's extremely interesting to us in terms of being able to understand and participate in what communities do around the U.S. that are not the metropolitan communities, not the big ones that we all know and understand and make a lot of investment in. So to that end, I wanted to come down and kind of talk to you a little bit about what I moved this forward a day ago. I wanted to talk about what's the relationship between the kind of technology that we're working on in education. And I have Tisha here, my colleague, which will also come later and explain a little bit more about Microsoft in education. But first I wanted to start by talking about what those technologies are, where they go today. And this is not going to be a very technical deep dive. It's just going to be kind of a level set of a background of where we are and how we think so that we can have a conversation from a place where we all understand what these things are doing. And the three I want to talk about specifically are cloud AI and Internet of Things. So let's start with cloud. What is cloud? Cloud is basically take a bunch of computers, put them together, put some software on them to provide services, add a network connection, and there you go, you have a cloud. But these clouds that we're talking about here are huge, right? They're very big, they're the most efficient way to manage compute power and storage. And they provide services for basically everything under the sun today. We don't even think about it, but everything we interact with in the digital world is a cloud. Netflix is a cloud, Skype is a cloud, Facebook is a cloud, Instagram, all of these things. They're all clouds. And you can, once you understand that this is where everything is going, you realize that all of our technology is going to have a back end that's essentially a cloud somewhere in the future. The startups that are here, I'm assuming they're all already on Azure, but if you're not, you know, URLs right there, you need to sign up. It's free to start, later on you'll pay, but initially you get to start and play for free. Again, as Tisha is going to tell you later, we have a cloud in Microsoft for educators, where they can come in and collaborate. Did I do that? Ah, no worries. But we have, even within Microsoft, we don't have one cloud. We have many. Office is a cloud and Skype's a cloud and all of those are clouds. But the most important thing that I want to, I want you to take out of what the cloud means. And essentially the reason I'm here is that cloud is democratizing our access to digital innovation. It means that whether you're in Burlington or in New York City, it makes no difference. You can create the next great startup right here. And that's because and thanks to the cloud and to the network, obviously. I'll talk about the networking a little bit more, but that's also very important. So we talked about cloud. Let's talk about IoT for a second. I apologize. I know we're under a pretty quick clip, so we have some videos to show. So we kind of go through it. So what's IoT? What's Internet of Things? Essentially, every device that you have that has connectivity to a cloud is an Internet of Things device. So your phone is an Internet of Things device. Your computer is. If you have a Nest Cam, it is an Internet of Things. If you have a Wi-Fi printer at home, it's an Internet of Things device. There are tons and tons of those devices today in many, many fields, as we all know. And the number of those devices is just growing exponentially. By 2020, as you can see from the numbers, the bottom line of this is essentially, on average, each one of us is going to have six Internet of Things devices that operate on our behalf, doing stuff to us, with us, for us. In education, the Internet of Things is getting adopted at a fairly reasonable pace. I'm going to show you a video. And I mean, I'm talking about one school that capitalized on that kind of adoption and used it to create efficiencies. But there's lots of things that you can do that allows you. Things like allowing children to move directly from rote learning or something to experimentation, creation, playing with it. Being able to connect teachers and parents and students better. All of these things are part of why the Internet of Things is so important. And again, one of the most important things about the Internet of Things in general is the fact that as long as you have network connectivity, you're able to connect to a cloud that does all the thinking for you. And again, this is why it's so important to have initiatives like Ignite that all they do is that they give you that connection, that pipe, that allows you to take a device and connect it to a cloud. So, let's have a look at this video. We had a budget of 6.6 million. And four years later, we have a budget of 3.3 million now. I'm Jaco Heiko. I'm the IT manager here of the community college. And we're about 10,000 students and about 1,000 employees. One of the business problems schools have, they've got a lot of square meters here in Netherlands. With IoT, you can create new business models in schools, making rooms smarter, making students smarter, especially with Microsoft Azure IoT services. Technology is everywhere. I think the app is very useful. You can find easily a room where you can talk with your students. When I want to reschedule a lesson, I can do it myself. We can have insights into the rooms. So we see how the occupation is at the school. And sometimes the school decides on this data that they need to expand or shrink the school. We don't need any hardware anymore to invest. It's all in Azure platform. So I don't have to change my main data center because it's in the cloud. And our staff is, of course, less than it was. Our staff was about 23. And it's now about 10 people also. Kind of killed it in the middle because of time. Okay, so we talked about IoT, we talked about cloud. So we have those big clouds, the two tons of computation, store tons of data. We have those devices that emit information, receive information back, do stuff. But somebody has to make sense of all that tons of information. And this is where I come in because people can do some of it, but not all of it by themselves. I think everybody's heard about artificial intelligence in some way, some form. What I want to do right now is kind of give you a flavor of where we are in terms of AI and where it's going, just as a general idea. So at the top right corner, you see Lisa Doe, the guy who was the reigning Go champion until 2016 where he lost to a machine. AlphaGo from Google basically beat him four out of five times. And to appreciate what this means, I want you to realize that in chess, you have 10 to the power of 120 options of how to move on the board. In Go, you have 10 to the power of 174. And that means 54 more zeros. That's a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion more complicated. And AI today has the computational power, the sophistication, the neural networks, the machine learning to actually be able to beat people in that game. When you look at, there's a sort of David Attenborough sitting in a Microsoft lab, he's getting filmed for an initiative with the British Museum where they have a lot of specimens that students can't touch because they're too rare. So what they're doing is they're creating virtual images of those specimens and they allow students to experiment with them, play with them, look at them, move them in virtual space so that they can get the impression of exactly what they do. A few weeks ago in China, a guy was trying to run from the authorities. He went into a stadium of 60,000 people. An official recognition software caught him. They just got his face out of the crowd. And this is, you know, minority report stuff, right? But it's real. It's happening right now. Google Home, Alexa, all those things, right? Do you notice how we start talking to them? They're not very conversational yet, but they're starting to pick it up. Personally, I still use it just to make a grocery list, but you can tell that in a few years you'll be able to actually have a conversation with those things. They'll ask you clarifying questions, so there's going to be a back and forth. And all that indicates a lot of smart, a lot of compute power, but again, how intelligent it is. So let's look at human parity, right? So when you compare machines to what humans can do, in terms of object recognition, speech recognition, machine reading, all that stuff, we already reached human parity. Machines can do it better to put it simply. There was an experiment recently with, they took like 50 lawyers and they put them against the machine in editing NDAs, non-disclosure agreements. The machines got a 94% accuracy rate. The lawyers got 85% accuracy rate. But that's not the important part. The important part is the machines did it in 30 seconds. The lawyer took an hour. So it's clearly moving very much into a direction that allows us to treat those machines as basically intelligent. This next video I want to show in the last one is about how AI and cloud and all those things in virtual reality are working for medical education. We've been teaching human anatomy the same way for 100 years. Students get a cadaver, then they look at medical illustrations and it's completely two-dimensional and the human body isn't. Microsoft HoloLens is a holographic computer that you wear. It enables you to bring your digital world into your real world. At Case Western Reserve University, we are focused on solving problems and creating new knowledge. My job is to teach and I really think this could impact almost everything that we teach people. With HoloLens, you can see the muscles on top of the skeleton all at the same time. You can bring them in and out and exactly understand where things sit. You can take any anatomical part and show any of it. You can move it around, you can make it kind of translucent so you can see through the outside and that really helped me understand how cardiac anatomy worked. I actually had a moment where I found the aortic valve and it was the first time that I'd actually seen the aortic valve in relation to all the other anatomical structures. It was a way of seeing it that you couldn't do with an actual heart. I think this will improve students' confidence in learning anatomy dramatically. By creating simulations with the HoloLens that lets them have an experience where they can fail, that would be the best way to learn because we don't allow people to fail too much in real-life medicine. With HoloLens, you could imagine having a class standing around a model almost like a tour group in a museum where they're all interacting completely naturally. I spend a huge amount of time to make sure they become the best professionals because it's all of our jobs to make the world a better place. So what happens next? This is the big question, right? What happens when all of those technologies, those clouds, those IoT devices, those HoloLens things, that AI, when they become better, which they will? And it will happen soon. Are you going to have in every class, every kid is going to wear a device that lets you know and they don't understand what they're talking about? That lets you know when they're anxious and they need help so that you don't have to just look at faces and not know? Is our self-driving cars going to change completely the way we live? Because we won't be needing to congregate so much anymore. You'll just get into a pod and drive around whenever you need to. The true answer is we have no idea. Nobody knows. Anybody who tells you they know, they're lying. We're going to find out soon, but at this point we can't predict it. But the one important thing, the final thought I want to leave you with is I hear a lot of people feeling a little anxious about what's going to happen next. Are our machines going to take over? Are they going to rule over the humans? And I think we need to look at it a little differently. Think about it this way. The AI, all those technologies, they're designed to make us superhuman. They're designed to give us the ability to extend our reach and to do more things. And when it comes to education, the hard question becomes, what do you teach kids? Because if there's an AI and there's all those technologies that are there to do the things that we normally, as people do, if you don't need to edit documents as a lawyer, what do you need to do as a lawyer? And when we think about that, and as you think about through today, what I encourage you to remember is that there are things that machines won't do, not in the foreseeable future. Things like physicality, enjoying touch, right? Things like empathy, like curiosity, like judgment. Those are things that are inherently not somewhere where we can see machines do very soon, so we're pretty safe there. So when you think about education for the future, the question becomes, how do we teach kids to take those traits that are always going to be human and use them to extend what they can do and to create better for other humans? And with that, I want to have my colleague Tisha come up and talk a little bit about what Microsoft is doing for education. And that's it. Thank you. Hi. Good afternoon. My name is Tisha Wen, and I am Microsoft Solutions Professional for the New England area. So I cover all the states in New England, except for Connecticut and New York. In my role, I talk through Microsoft Education Solutions to the K-12 students' school district audience lining up whatever the student priorities are for the particular district and talk through how Microsoft technologies can help them meet their needs, exceed their goals. So in my discussion with school superintendents and others, I highlight the things on the slide, for example. So the upper left, Microsoft Educator Community. So we at Microsoft, as you can tell, we are strongly invested in education. However, we realize that we need to equip and enable the teacher audience so we can deliver a one-time training. However, that's not very effective. So the Microsoft Educator Community, for example, have all the training modules built out. That will take about five years for any teacher or any principal to go through. And the modules are based on things like STEM, STEAM, cloud computing, collaboration, persistence, all of those soft skills and hard skills as well relating to mastering STEM and STEAM curriculum. Along with that work, we have the educator experts. So when we have educators who engage in the community, because every time you take one of those courses, you earn points and you get a badge. And we at Microsoft, we recognize you. And we're like, whoa, we see that you have earned these badges and you have done these things in your classroom and your kids are actually achieving really well from your records of results that's inside of the community. Would you like to become an educator expert and share these with others around the country and around the world? So teachers and principals and school district personnel have that opportunity where we have educator experts as models of using Microsoft technologies to meet the needs of students. Last but not least, showcase schools. So a lot of our educator experts impressed their colleagues at their schools so much that it bled throughout the school. And before you know it, the principal got involved and was like, we should just become a Microsoft showcase school to showcase the good work we're doing relating to our student population needs and priorities to be specific. So currently we have about 621 showcase schools. Last, Microsoft Imagine Academy. So in my role at Microsoft, I get a lot of feedback about what about the kids that's not going to go to college? They're going to go straight into the workforce. Where are they going to learn those skills? How can you help with that? So we at Microsoft, we have developed Imagine Academy. Where students can get things like their Microsoft Office certifications. So they can become masters of Excel, masters of Word, masters in Microsoft applications that help them in the workforce as well. And we have built that entire curriculum out and linked it to Microsoft certifications and that's how we Imagine Academy. One thing that I would like to share is before coming over to Microsoft, I spent about 25 years in school districts throughout Texas, Alabama, Massachusetts, Dubai and India. In addition, I did work with about seven Spanish-speaking countries in all of their high schools going completely paperless relating to biology, chemistry, physics and health. So my role at Microsoft completely aligns to my talents and passions and I am excited about the world of tomorrow that my colleague described. And I feel really privileged that I have a job where I'm able to help form that world relating to my education background. Have a good evening. Thanks. That's really exciting. And it's good to have you engage. I know that some of our folks will want to follow more with what Microsoft's offering and this is I think your first visit to Burlington so it's a chance for you to get to know our community and vice versa. So with that, to keep things moving, what I'd like to do now is invite Ann DeMarro up to join us and as the Associate Professor for Emergent Media at Champlain College and the Director of the Emergent Media Center. Please. Thank you. Hi. Hi, everybody. Give me a minute. That's my daughter a long time ago. So anyway, hi everybody. I'm actually an associate dean. I am a full professor and it's really my pleasure to be here today because we helped get the original funding for BTV Ignite based on our thinking about education apps. So I'm like, yay, we're kicking this off. I'm also really pleased because there's a lot of friends in this audience that we've either worked with or I've worked for and who are deeply engaged in technology and pushing it forward or education and helping our Vermont students or our students in general thrive. And I'm really happy because some people might know I'm kind of famous in Vermont for starting Champlain's game program which is one of the top ten in the nation over 500. Years ago I went on a cruise with Microsoft Education for free. There was about 30 of us from all over the United States and it was interesting. We were up there like this on the boat in presentations. So I'm really, you know, it's kind of a nice group to be with. So anyway, what I do now is that I direct the Emergent Media Center. And it's really, this is our definition for ourselves, fearless learning, community, designing dynamic processes and tools to create meaningful solutions. And we have three parts to us. We have the center, the studio, some of you have worked with us in the past where we actually employ students to create digital media. We partner with business nonprofits and government agencies. And then we have our maker lab that synced with the generator. We open together. And it's for our entire college community and it's a physical prototype taping lab with a host of tools. And you might say, well why are they together? Well I think IOT really kind of explains the whole thing. And I look at, we combine digitality and physicality in that space. And then lastly, we have graduate programs that are really about, everybody likes to talk about design thinking, we're designers, but we're also into collaboration, production methods, and definitely innovation. So when I look at these three together, they seem like the separate entities, but it's code, physical hardware, and human creativity and talent that we're bringing together. And when I look back to when I went to school, which was typewriter days, and I was an art student, I really wanted direct experience. I think I heard that before. An interaction and personal creativity. And the last thing at that time, even though my dad was an engineer that appealed to me was code. And I just thought of these humongous machines that turned through the punch cards at the time and spit out zeros and ones. And it was boring to me at the time. However, despite my limited viewpoint at the time, code, hardware, and creativity have did some amazing things back then, like put a man on the moon, but they were still seemingly out of reach for someone like me, an 18-year-old woman. Sorry, it just was. But a lot of things have changed since that day, and code and hardware have enabled a lot. And I love this quote by a game designer friend of mine, Clint Hawking, he says, it's code do, we can do anything. And I think that's really true as seen by your talk here. First, code itself has been more accessible to everybody. Secondly, it's tumbled in price and shrunk to become the size of some diseases that we carry and wear. And thirdly, we can all create amazing things, whether it's digital photographs or printed 3D sculptures or conversations or more active bodies. Or we can work collaboratively, as in the case of today's NASA scientists who are using virtual reality to direct the Mars rover. And what has changed and will continue is how code, hardware, and human creativity creates experiences. Experiences that are causing individual and cultural change that crosses into all of our human endeavors, from politics to the humanities. I wanted you to take a minute and peek into the near future. I'm not going to get the big chart, but just three key points or four key points. Technology is going to become increasingly intuitive to use. Imagine there's going to be no cords, no more keyboards, no more boxes. And putting us inside of reality is that we could not imagine and it will seamlessly pervade our lives. We won't even know we're participating in technology. Just as today's cell phones do for us. No one thinks twice about having a cell phone on you all the time. But questions still remain about how these pervasive technologies will impact us as individuals and as societies. It's already transformed commerce and communication. How many of us, for instance, buy online, message instead of call, binge on Netflix or Hulu, or Skype or WhatsApp with distant parents and grandchildren? I know I do. And when will we ever put down the darn phone? This watch was supposed to be a solution. I now carry both. I don't know about you guys. These are the questions that we're trying to answer as both educators and technologists at Champlain. As an educator, I'm proud that in 12 years at the EMC, we've educated over 600 students working at the studio. And there, as an academic center, our success is evidenced by the fact that 98% of our students continue all the way through Champlain. That's really high for college education. And I'm also here because 96% of these students are employed in their career field within six months of graduation, both locally, like a dealer, and internationally. And because together we take a deep hands-on dive into learning. It's really our key thing about ever-changing technology, starting with our earliest forays into serious games, gamification, social media, mobile apps, virtual world building, and alternative controllers, to more recent leaps into 3D printing, video marketing, Internet of Things, robotics, large screen interactive, augmented reality, and virtual reality, approaching each with intent, reflectivity, and playfulness. I did create the game degree. Projects such as Breakaway that we did with the UN, it's our longest-running program. And it's, you know, this is the Me Too moment, but we started this 12 years ago to address violence against women and girls around the globe and was successfully launched in Palestine and also in El Salvador, where we had really positive results on its impact with youth, your youth, the eight to 16-year-olds. And then Make a Change, which is now being tested. It's a game to educate college students to prevent sexual assaults and rape on college campuses. These are issues of our times. And then, partnering with UVM, the medical researcher Peter Bingham on a Ford Foundation grant, a game for children with cystic fibrosis that was proven to increase both their motivation for completing their breathing exercises, but also it increasing their lung capacity, which we did not expect, but was hoped for. There it is. And then Lake Quest, created for Echo down the road, the Aquarium and Science Center. We have a mobile game suite there to teach visitors about lake ecology and sustainability of the lake. And we have a new project that's launching with them this fall. And Wealth Generator, it's a global financial equity game with UNESCO's Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development to teach folks about how to create sustainable communities around the world. And then Pixel Cloud, it's really a sculpture for exploring big data and emotion through tweets. Grafini and Flight, if you've flown through BTV, you will have an opportunity to play it there. And lastly, our work in VR and with the folks back in the back here, Erin and Sam. We've done quite a few VR projects. One with Erin and Sam, you can actually smell the experience as you go through a narrative, but also in Burlington's launch BT this week. And in Texas at Digital Now this week, a VR surgical simulator for educating surgeons. And as our client likes to say, a flight simulator for surgeons. And what's a little different than what you saw, you actually can cut the bone and get your metrics and get the tension back when you do so. So it's hoped, as our friends say, they're like, usually you only have one chance on a cadaver and this is your other chances as a student. So in closing, working with our insightful students on these projects, I come back to what I learned in regards to the question that as educators and technologists, we need to address, how will future technology impact us, our culture and our society? What I predict is that more and more, technology will be offering virtual experiences that we will record in our brain as actuality. Some will be disturbing, such as early morning tweets and bullying posts, but some will enrich our lives as the recent news that scientists return the sense of touch to a man with a prosthetic arm. And some will unite communities offering empathy and knowledge like breakaway has done in the prevention of gender violence. Secondly, as designers of these experiences, we must be aware of the potentials, the worst and the best. And as a society, we must recognize and support for a new type of literacy, a human digital literacy. So all generations can thoughtfully interpret, build and make choices, regarding these experiences. I've come to recognize that technology is a powerful tool that amplifies attitudes and actions. I'm going to say that again, technology amplifies attitudes and actions. Towards that end, as designers, educators, and citizens, we must find a way to hold up a model of our highest values, because it's exactly those values that technology will amplify and broadcast. And that's it. Thank you. I don't know about you, but I get so excited when I see those kind of opportunities and things happening. You know, I've been in town for a number of months now, and time and again, folks pointed me back to what Ann's been doing and what the Emergent Media Center's been doing. And you know, there's technology for technology sake, but you show so many interesting ways of applying technology to other problems, to empowering women, to reimagining different things. And I hope folks could take back some ideas into our classrooms across the state and across the country. So with that, thank you, Ann. Let me invite a couple of our colleagues from the University of Vermont. And I'm going to ask them to come up together. First, I'd like John Downs, the director for the Tarrant Institute for Innovative Education. So this is something, certainly, that they think about on a daily basis. And also, Karen Colleen, who is Associate Dean for Innovation and Technology. And Associate Professor for Educational Leadership and Policy Studies. Since I murdered one title, I'm trying to get them slightly more accurate as we go along. So with that, gentlemen, thank you. It's nice to be here. We're going to, we just had a little kibitz. And I'm going to do a little more macro perspective. And John's going to talk a little more micro perspective. And I'm going to use more storytelling than technical detail to try and implore you to focus your great talents and skills on the way to improve education. So I'm going to start with a story. In 1994, I actually joined coming out of college, a group called Teach for America. And I learned about it after learning about an innovator named Wendy Kopp, coming out of Princeton, who designed something like a domestic Peace Corps for teachers. They recruited recent college graduates to go into school systems around the country that were hard to staff schools. They had school systems. They had difficulty bringing in teachers and they had severe teacher shortages. And I thought that was kind of innovative and I joined, I joined in. I went to a place called Shreveport, Louisiana, Northwest Louisiana, which is a fairly tough city even today. Back then it was, I think, on the top 10 list for most violent cities in the country and a difficult place. I was assigned to teach special education in Ledbetter Heights, which is named after Hoody Ledbetter, the famous American folk and blues musician and minstrel, an innovative himself who was so innovative he sang his way out of prison twice for murder. That's two times murder, two times out of prison. But the middle school I taught in, Hollywood Middle School, was nothing like Hollywood, California, at all. The school system itself, sorry, the school building itself had very high metal walls, some corrugated metal walls, and there was razor wire at the top of the walls. And the razor wire faced out, not in, it faced out, which was to keep burglars for coming in. There was copper flashing on this 1960s building and downspouts, which were routinely stolen for scrap metal. When I drove to school in the morning, I used to go in very early, they're passed by, as you imagine, fairly dilapidated houses and what we call shotgun houses, very thin houses that were worn down. There weren't many cars around and there were routinely gaps. It looked like Detroit does, gaps between the buildings. And in between the buildings were high grass or untended lawns. And you would often see packs of dogs that were curled up, sleeping, waiting for the sun to come up to wake up in the mist between houses. It was just wild. It was very, very unusual experience for me because I grew up in a far more privileged place in upstate New York and Ithaca, New York. This is what my kids saw every day. I started teaching Louisiana history with 16-year-old textbooks. And these were the types of conditions I experienced that Kozol has written about in American education quite eloquently. My point in sharing that little story is those conditions still exist in American schools. They're remarkably robust problems that you have the capacity to try and ameliorate. I'm not going to geek out and tell you about technology that I think could win over the hearts and minds of children. I think that's in your wheelhouse. But I will implore you to please direct your talents where they're needed the most, okay? So here's what we do know. The best way to improve education in the United States, to lift our international prominence, to raise our achievement, to close achievement gaps, is to improve teaching. Full stop. Yes, children do well on test scores and they develop well and they have better medical outcomes if their parents are of high SES. That is true. But under the control of schools, under the control of principals, teachers are the most important and consequential variable that contributes to the advancement of children. So your tech should be focused on teachers, in my opinion. The production, the development, the improvement of the training of teachers and where they're teaching will make a consequential different to children's lives. If you can do that, if you can steer this advanced tech, this opportunity through a high bandwidth network systems, if you can figure out a way to connect high quality teaching and teachers to that technology, particularly where it's needed the most, you're going to contribute to amazing solution in the United States, okay? And arguably in other places in the world as well. So under the control of principals are teachers. If you can work on that one issue, that's great. And the second thing you've heard me ruminate on this just a little bit is high quality teachers are actually not evenly distributed in the United States. It's quite segregated in the U.S. Did you know that 85% of teachers teach within 45 miles of where they graduated from high school? 85% within 45 miles of where they went to high school. And you can think back in high school, you probably had a teacher that graduated from that high school and you were like, ah, the old dog's been there a long time, right? Okay, that's actually quite systematic across the United States. It's an even pattern. Teaching is a very localized profession. It's a little more localized than other types of professions, street level bureaucrats like nurses and social workers and cops. Teachers tend to teach where they're from and they tend to be interested in teaching, excuse me, in places where they grew up and where they were raised, which means we've got a quality, a capital, human capital swirl, right? And it's a difficult labor market to break, but technology could help. Could your technology help? I think it can, right? We talked about the Internet of Things a little bit here already, but the Internet of Things is not evenly distributed as a type of infrastructure, as a type of technology, just as human capital, like teaching, is not evenly distributed as well. So can you break this labor market pattern? Teachers do enjoy challenges. Teachers tend to have slight preferences for teaching in places that are less... Well, let me say this. There's a segment of the teaching population that's impacted towards hard conditions and difficult teaching circumstances, and there are those that tend to shy away from it and gravitate towards less variability in their teaching jobs. That's okay, too. Technology can help teachers do that sorting process better where they can match their preferences to teach in certain ways with children that want to learn that way. That type of dynamic can be improved through improved technology. So I mentioned that the finest American teachers on average are not in schools where the greatest concentration of children living in poverty are. These types of educational deserts are highly associated with poverty in the United States, and tech can improve that and type to ameliorate that. The type of advanced curriculum and curriculum innovation, hardware, software that we've seen here, access to books and materials are not evenly distributed, so the challenge to you is can you make them more distributed, right, inexpensively to the places where they're needed the most? We talked a lot about virtual reality here, which is an amazing opportunity, augmented reality, to bring different world experiences where transportation and travel won't let the individuals out. And I challenge you to work on that. So I think the biggest message I just want to leave you with is that the best way to improve education in the United States is to focus on teachers, is to focus on creating high quality teachers and making sure they're teaching where they're needed the most. John. Hi. My name is John Downes. I'm the director of the Tarrant Institute, which is a professional development institute. We work with 35 different middle schools all over Vermont. We've been doing it for 10 years, steadily increasing in scale, so we've touched on probably 55 schools now, and we plan to keep going. Our focus is professional development, so the remarks you just heard resonate for us. You know, how can we prepare teachers for the kinds of schools we aspire to? The three pieces we try to put together are this high quality professional development, a 21st century vision, so how can we exploit technology? In particular, how do we exploit technology to advance the best practices we can come up with for our focus, which is young adolescents? So how do you leverage the technology, the best practices with young adolescents, and the professional development to transform whole schools? So we've all come, the folks I work with have all come from training particular teachers or small groups of teachers, and we're trying to tackle the issue of moving a whole school forward. So that's the context of what we do, and I wanted to start off with a story of my own. It's actually an excerpt from a fictional scenario that I read a number of years ago, and I think it'll help with my design thinking hat on. This is the empathy portion of the exercise. As he does every morning, Steve Early, age 14, eats breakfast in front of the TC, the telecommunications computer. While he watches a news program in one window, his personal communication service relays a video message in another window from his friend Nelson, who we met at a summer science camp. Nelson's vid message is about a train derailment on a river upstream from the campground where the school groups stayed. Nelson explains the train caused a hazardous fuel spill and now endangers the entire ecosystem up and down the river. I'm afraid it'll poison the water and hurt the animals. Also concerned, Steve constructs a scout agent to search for news clips about the accident, chronologically, and store them on the school server. As he finishes his breakfast, Steve and his parents watch the video that the agent retrieved. And I'll stop there and just explain that the rest of the scenario explores how the next couple of weeks unfolds for Nelson and Steve and their student partners as they try to take real-world practical action to minimize the effects of this spill. And in the course of doing that, they are using project design and management software that they can access on there in the scenario referred to as PDAs. And they are able to communicate with students who they are collaborating with closer to the site as those students act as kind of data gatherers and observers while the more remote group are accessing university professors and experts and modeling software. The modeling software has a student-friendly component to it that's fully integrated in what is fully professional modeling software. And the teachers all along are engaging with each other at a distance and with teaching experts at a distance so that they can help lay the groundwork and support the students while they're doing this work. The verbiage was a little strange because this was written in 1998. And in some respects, we're still trying to do the same thing. We're still trying to advance what we might call project-based learning in many of our schools and we're still trying to figure out how to leverage technology to do so. So this is particularly interesting, I think, because there are patterns that we're seeing in this. That sort of scenario would not be unfamiliar to the schools we're working with. So they are invested in student-directed project-based learning using technology. In the course of exploring that, they're finding that it's requiring a complete rethinking of how time and space are used in education. Where it happens, when it happens, they're broaching this idea of ubiquitous learning anytime, anywhere, made possible with technology but also made possible by just thinking outside the box, where can the learning happen and why would we constrain it to when teachers are immediately and physically available in schools. There's an interesting trend right now in Vermont and many other places in the country of personalized learning. We have a policy context right now that in some ways permits and maybe even encourages this sort of learning opportunity. And we're in a situation to take advantage of that. So in the course of working with our schools, we're trying to work through compliance with the policy elements, but more importantly how to interpret those into a rich and meaningful experience for students. Policy very rarely gets us there. So it needs to be interpreted. It gets back to why teacher education ends up being so important. I can mention a few technologies that relate to some of this work that are already underway that may be familiar to you and if they're not, it's worth looking into because there's been substantial work done and they may be starting points. That includes ubiquitous internet access, of course. But it's remarkable how many kids don't actually have ubiquitous access to the internet either because they don't have devices that they own themselves or their schools don't have the devices or permit the devices. In the case of kids who may have perfectly powerful handheld devices but they're nonetheless not available in the course of inquiry during the school day. There are open educational resources which is an interesting avenue for compiling in the cloud high quality learning resources whether they're lesson designs or materials and they can be whole packages that an educator can access and through kind of a social media filtering process can confidently just steal completely and that can save tremendous time and advance a teacher's practices much more quickly. Distance learning both synchronous and asynchronous continues to develop in its sophistication and it continues to disappoint in many respects in its efficacy. Modeling and simulation tools I think the ones that we've heard about here are important. I think AI is particularly an interesting gamification augmented reality. People are dabbling but they're yet to penetrate classrooms in a significant way outside the specialized school kind of situation. So if I was to leave you with a problem statement it would be that we need apps that better serve the confluence of student engagement, project learning, self-direction, and social learning. And if you think of some of the AI stuff there were a number of references to how it could engage groups of people but that's often overlooked and so is a lot of advanced technology integration in schools often under-sells the critical role of social learning for cognition, for engagement, for meaning, for wanting to come to school every day. How can we develop project management tools for self-directed learning in real-world contexts so not to just manage what they need to do to get done what the teacher wants them to get done but to get done complex things no one has anticipated yet. Immersive virtual collaboration accessible across ethnicities, cultures, and languages. So in Vermont in particular I think it's difficult to give students the real authentic collaborative experiences outside their specific cultural, linguistic, and ethnic domain. I want to draw back to that original article and seize on one quote that I think is still a source of yearning for those of us who are trying to seize these opportunities. Connections between schools, homes, and the rest of the community will enable students to relate what is happening in the world outside to what is happening in school. It will allow teachers to coordinate formal education and informal learning and will allow the community to reintegrate education into its daily life. Thanks. I think the two conversations just now were so important because it's very easy to think about the Star Trek Jetsons aspect of bringing technology into a classroom but in fact as teachers know and as we know one step away their world is hugely challenging and access to resources and access to the things that they need to be the kind of teacher that they want to be and to be as effective. And so when we did this challenge the idea of the reverse pitch some people said we should demand that it's going to be an IoT solution or we should demand that it's going to be a VR solution. And what we settled on is let's make it broad. Let's just call it delivering education so that we can do things that our students are facing and maybe a little jetsony but we can also do things that are doing the heavy lifting of education helping support our teachers. Telepresence can be letting a student see something really wonderful but it may also be just something two teachers collaborate or co-teach or build a different skill set by having a chance to experience something they wouldn't have. The reason we left it so broad is that you can come up with ideas and new ways of thinking about this and that's what's exciting to us. So thank you guys. That was really compelling. Let me just move forward a little bit and I'd like to invite Leanne Smith up and Leanne is the STEM Academy leader for Essex High School and you're up to your eyeballs and this with 100 fantastic exciting students every time I see you. Hi everyone. As he said I'm Leanne Smith and I lead the STEM Academy at Essex High School. I also teach math and I've started a mobile app design class that's primarily based around JavaScript. I'm passionate about innovative approaches to education and I'm really happy to be here to talk to you today. I have some kind of specific things I'm looking for so the first idea I have two. The first one relates to the mobile app development class. What I would like to do in the mobile app development class is virtually bring expert coders into the room. I would like to have the students have more hands-on help with the creation and development of their programs. I imagine that you folks could create some sort of virtual workspace where a group of professional programmers could have access to the screens that the students are working on. If a student needs help they could initiate a chat with the students and I would like to have the students have more hands-on help and if a student needs help they could initiate a chat room where they could talk to their helper the helper would be able to see and possibly control the student's screen and the two of them could work together on solving the problem. The professionals wouldn't all need to be in the same location. We just need to find a group of people who are willing to be logged in and accessible for the duration of the class. There is always a concern about security when working with high school students or everything that went on so I could keep an eye on everything that happened in the class. The curriculum I'm using is based on the online CodeHS platform I don't know if you've heard of that or not but it was developed by a pair of recent Stanford graduates it's being marketed rather heavily by the organization Code.org you may have heard of the hour of code that's put on each year it's become big millions of students around the year do that that's the most visible activity that Code.org sponsors but they've also put together a generic high school curriculum that I'm going to be trying for the first time next year. I think the combination of the CodeHS curriculum platform which is available worldwide and an online learning space with professional coders could make a powerful and scalable educational platform that could easily extend beyond this one class at Essex High School. In my opinion one of the reasons that coding isn't taught very often in high schools is that most teachers aren't all that comfortable with coding. Many of us took some sort of coding class in college I think I took Pascal in 1983 but everything changes so fast that it isn't really feasible for teachers in high school to stay on top of current developments. If we could virtually bring experts into the classroom along with having a package curriculum like CodeHS I think more high schools could teach coding not just here in Vermont but anywhere. I'd also like to give a plug for the green up app that was recently released by Code for BTV this is rather timely as you probably know or some of those of you who are local know Code for BTV is a civic hacking group in our area. They picked up a project that was originally started by students in my app development class with help from John Need at Gail and Health Care Solutions we worked on it last summer and it was finished by other folks in the community. The app is available on Google Play and the Apple Store right now which is pretty exciting there was an article in this morning's paper if you wanted to learn more about that. If you're going to participate in Green Update tomorrow that's yearly the first Saturday in May here. I recommend you download it to help coordinate your team with your project plans. What I'm trying to emphasize here besides that the app is cool and you should use it is that Essex High School has a coding program that's already well established and integrated into the community and your efforts would be put immediately to use if you came up with something that worked for us. My second idea relates to the STEM Academy at Essex High School so I'm the leader of that. We have 120 students out of the 1300 students that we have at Essex High School students are very interested in this program and above and beyond experience it gives motivated students the opportunity to learn more about STEM careers that they're considering. It's sort of a personalized development personalized learning opportunity but it's not so much a curriculum it's more giving students the chance to interact with professionals in the community so it's personalized in the way that older high school kids get to see where their career might lead them. The main components of the Academy are a lecture series we have people come in about every two or three weeks one semester internship class people get to spend 40 hours out in the community with a professional that shares a common interest of theirs and also a capstone project. I would like our students to be able to virtually participate in capstone projects that are not necessarily located in the state of Vermont. UVM has been very helpful with providing mentors for this program but there are other institutions out of state that are doing cool things that I would like my students to be able to be involved in. I was very inspired by the 4K microscope experience that Chattanooga STEM students were able to have with scientists at USC. The high school students were able to control the microscope remotely from their school in Tennessee and see what the California scientists were seeing. I would like to think of other ways that students could be involved with remote research or any other cool remote experience. The HoloLens stuff that you guys showed with the surgery the medical advisory is the largest strand in my group I have 45 students high school that are very interested to work in the medical profession in some way so if we could virtually be involved with even just the curriculum in the HoloLens that would be great or whatever is being taught to medical students at Case Western or anywhere else so those kinds of virtual medical experiences to virtually put students in those spaces would be great or maybe students could be in a place where they control robots maybe they could virtually be somewhere with the robots moving around and they control it anywhere that allows a student to virtually experience something bigger than they could experience just here in Vermont. I have programs in place at my school that would allow me to implement any solutions you could develop for us one of the big things in the high school is where do you find time to do all these cool programs but we already have time carved out of the students day for the students who signed up for the app class I have 22 students for next year and there's also time carved out of the day for the mentoring projects the internships the lecture series so anything that happens could easily be started if someone in this room could develop something and we also have internet too at Essex High School so if any of your solutions require fast internet we could make that happen thank you for your attention and I look forward to making creative things happen with you and that's great and you know I love every time I drop over to her shop because they're just getting on with it the students are just sleeves rolled up and doing incredible things and really impressive and in Vermont you know we have a commitment to the young people growing up here if we want Burlington to thrive and Vermont to thrive then we have to help people be prepared for the 21st century economy and it's shifting and the pace of disruption is accelerating and we could turn that disruption to our advantage or that disruption will happen to us and it will be to our disadvantage and so it's great to know that so many students are able to take advantage of that it's great to have a partner who's ready to say bring it on let's go use it so thank you Leigh Ann and the last speaker is one who will help explain what's going on a bit across the nation on this topic and also a little bit more about what actually is a high bandwidth gigabit app I'd like to invite up Scott Turnbull who's traveled here to join us he's the national technical lead for U.S. Ignite and he's been going around to the various reverse pitches trying to make sure that we all have the right idea of how to take this forward so Scott please I should have loaded this beforehand but is there anybody can get this loaded onto the system thanks so actually I want to turn the focus towards you all because this meeting is about what you are going to create and what you are going to deliver to the community that creates transformative experiences for the students in them what we've heard consistently through all the presenters here is education is really about experience and it's about collaboration it's about something we haven't been able to achieve before with the current generation of reference-based technologies that's really what we've had so to share my personal story to start with it's this one right here I first got involved with the Internet in the same way that people who eventually got addicted first got got involved with cocaine no one who eventually became a cocaine addict tells you that their first experience with cocaine was okay it's alright it's kind of cool they never say that they say it was great it was awesome I've never experienced anything like that before that was my first experience with the Internet and I'm talking about as old school Internet as you can get 1993 I'm young enough I've gone through college I come from poverty by the way I had to join the army to get into college but I finally got there I was hungry for education I sat down at the terminal in 1993 and I typed mosaic which most of you won't know what it is but it was the first generation of web browser web browser popped up I'd never seen one before it said CERN across the top of the page I was born with two great advantages one I am obsessed with science and technology I've always wanted to learn and two I was big enough that I came from a poor neighborhood no one could really pick on me for it so I was entitled to my interest so I got there CERN pops up oh my god what CERN I spent the entire day in the computer lab I was hooked from day one now we're talking about the solutions you are going to develop let's move forward to today what's the experience like for a learner in today's world isn't just reading a CERN paper what if they loaded a virtual reality environment that allowed them to walk the halls of CERN to go down to the particle accelerator to make their own experiment in virtual reality to get the results of it and to play with that all day as much as they wanted what happens to that learner in a virtual environment but they can bring in a physicist from CERN who could talk to them in real time none of you got that totally wrong or I've never seen this before this is actually pretty cool let's talk about this further what is the experience of that learner in that environment over what I did before if that had been available to me it would have taken dynamite to get me out of that building I never would have left I'd probably still be there today I love it for a second my name is Scott Turnbull I'm the National Technology Leader for US Ignite it was founded by the National Science Foundation to promote the growth of advanced gigabit networks nationally by identifying applications and services that run on them that let them be transformative to the communities and ways we had not seen before we have a cohort of 25 cities and I just added to this map before I popped up so I hope I got everybody right and spelled correctly all communities nationally and in Australia all dedicated to building out their local advanced network and providing transformative applications in any one of six key national priority areas but we're going to talk about education here today in edutect now advanced gigabit networks are a hard concept sometimes to get across but it's a lot easier than people give it credit for it's about speed it's about getting more information with no limit so as much information as the world can offer you whether that be 4k video uncompressed audio high quality scans from university archives there's no barrier it can get to the learner as easily and quickly as possible and the other is real time so that interacting with someone online is almost the same as interacting with them in real life that is not just an asynchronous conversation I would actually put forth a small theory that a lot of our bitter divide in this country unfortunately experiencing right now is coming from this asynchronous nature of communication I can say something detached from where you are in real time and it doesn't really matter so I can say something really terrible and post it and you can say something terrible back and post it and we've all ran off to the shadows before we've come back and seen how that really affected people but if interactions weren't said in real time if you can see I really overshot the mark I heard this person's feeling or if you could experience everybody here thinks I'm a real jerk how would your communication change how would a learning environment change I think gamification is a great trend I was glad to see a depression quest put up before I think that's a fantastic application of gaming for education there's some other if anyone here is a gamer I really encourage you to check out a game called that dragon cancer it was made by two parents who had experienced a loss of a very young infant to cancer they processed their experience by creating a game called that dragon cancer it gets across in an artistic way the sense of grief that these people experienced I don't think any other way could have done so that ability to create these experiences is really at the forefront of Vance Gigabit Networks the last bit is really it's about secure communications that are that isolate the experience for the users in a way that makes them safe to encounter each other in that environment that might be public safety education networks it might be health education networks it might be a network of learners that need to just dynamically reconfigure the local network to stream in high quality content and then give the rest of that bandwidth back to the university at a later date it's that flexibility in that security that has not been achieved before some examples of things that we see happening nationally are I heard mentioned earlier the 4k microscope that's a great product what it does is it takes advanced scientific instrumentation that's located in one area the state makes it available to all schools in the state and that students in the classroom can use these high capacity microscopes as if they were there in the room with them so it gives them access to STEM education through instrumentation that they were to have before and that can be extended not just to telescopes, not just to microscopes but to telescopes to gas chromatographs to any type of scientific instrumentation but I don't want to leave out humanities you could have looked through the entire Vatican collection within a half hour every page of an individual old medieval manuscript down to the level of being able to see what the fibers on the parchment have what has happened to them over time if you were a historian if you were some sort of humanities major I'll get to realtime interactions in a second because it's more applicable there but high speed also applies to things so what the microscope can do is can take 4k imagery of these microscopic slides that are being mounted in realtime and let students conduct experiments right there they can see to the level of individual cell organisms on the scan and they can actually conduct science in the classroom and they get the experience of being at a high end university at their high school other things are like creating a virtual environment for education for VR a solar power plant in VR what the gigabit portion of that is is they scan in realtime someone with a connect device it brings that 3D avatar into the VR learning space with the students and with the instructor and lets them walk through that VR space as if they were there and slow latency enough to do that as well so realtime interactions is something I was talking about it's another in addition to just throughput being able to get more information down the pipe than you've been able to before it's about having no lag even skype, anyone skyped or hang out or something like that they have a hang out bingo you've probably seen before oh no you go or you've talked over somebody oh I'm having a problem with my connection they have these bingo cards that you can sort of circle on these experiences that takes that entirely away with music together with people at different locations and we've had several instances of that between Burlington and Chattanooga and Burlington a few other locations but you can access master musicians in New York or in Boston or in Albuquerque you can be the master musician and talk to students in any one of these locations it opens up the possibilities for music, dramatic performances dance lectures when we talk about humanities and local climate in the United States boy God bless you that's a brave thing to do but you could do it with people across the country in these virtual environments in ways that you couldn't do it in an online forum because again it's easy to hit post and run off to the shadows and it is to look somebody in the eye even virtually and say this is important to me I really really want you to hear me and they say that back to you they express to you what's important to them that's transformative and these are the kinds of tools we're talking about putting in the hands of students that you are going to create and that what this really takes is I think that was my last slide so what this really takes is it means that innovators in Burlington don't have to leave Burlington to have world-class experiences they no longer have to go to the New York because those are the only places these things can happen they can stay right here in Burlington and they can go to Mars they don't have to wonder what it's like they can tell their friends just what it's like these are the experiences that you are being challenged to create and that once once these are created those are shared with that 25 list of 25 cities that we've seen we have markets ready to adopt this if you create a great application that has a high impact markets ready to come to talk to you there's a little money being offered as part of this let's not forget that, that's always helpful money sure makes things a little easier sometimes but there's markets ready to look at this to adopt it in the future if you create a successful product and there are years across the country ready to hear about successful models success is compelling success is undeniable people cannot look away from that so if you are successful even on this scale we have the ability to amplify that so everyone in the country can see or hear it and with partners like Microsoft we can scale this nationally almost without difficulty or at least an unprecedented level of ease that we've ever had before so thank you very much I'm looking forward to seeing what comes out of this reverse pitch and I'm really excited to join you all in Burlington I think that's great you can see some of the great things that are going on and you know for me I talked about breaking down geographic barriers we want to do that within the city and we want to do that across the state but every one of those cities has an entire organization of a developer community of users of people trying to lead their innovation who are willing and ready to work with us I have peers in each one of those 25 cities we meet all the time and Scott and I and Scott's colleagues can work together to open the door we want to work together I want to thank Scott and all the speakers again I think it was very inspirational now I know because I've been in the chair a thousand times this is a great chance to sneak out because the speakers are done either Friday or Netflix is coming up but I really really really encourage you to take a minute to move to the room upstairs one floor away one elevator ride with any luck I don't know if pizza has arrived but with any luck it's supposed to be here by now so we'll see but in particular the real value is is that we have folks that have come all the way across the country to be here to answer your questions to engage with you and we also have a couple other folks that we didn't introduce as part of the audience but the BTV Ignite executive fellows Jill being one of the BTV Ignite executive fellows but Julie, Rob and anybody else who's in the room can put your hand up for community and our local technical experts who are also here to help so I would normally take Q&A but I'm going to insist that you take at least a couple minutes to move upstairs and then come back any logistics should people leave their stuff here let's collect your material and there's a stairway with a bit of a twist to the turn up and then the element