![\"David](\"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/danto-blog-image-1.png\")
<\/p>\nThose of you who regularly read my blogs know I often wax poetic about technology or collaboration or remote working, and otherwise generally geeky stuff.\u00a0 But the stay at home orders around the COVID-19 pandemic have thrown everyone for a loop, and I\u2019m no exception.\u00a0 This blog is shamelessly about my wife, Helen and all she is doing to support developmentally delayed toddlers.<\/p>\n
When Helen and I went out to social events she was never able to explain to anyone what I do for a living.\u00a0 I\u2019m the engineer \/ nerd \/ geek.\u00a0 She\u2019s the MSW \/ Social Worker.\u00a0 Our joke was I could tell you why something was broken and how to fix it, she could ask you how you felt about all that.\u00a0 We\u2019ve been married for almost 30 years, and there was never any doubt about which one of us gets to sit in the Captain\u2019s chair.<\/p>\n
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When the Coronavirus pandemic forced everyone to stay home to slow the spread of the infection, I had no issues transitioning to remote working \u2013 it is my normal mode anyway.\u00a0 Helen, however, didn\u2019t have the same easy transition.<\/p>\n
Helen works for an Early Intervention agency here in New Jersey.\u00a0 Her job is to visit the homes of young toddlers that are experiencing developmental delays, and work with the child and his or her parents to break-down the learning process and jumpstart education.\u00a0 This often involves working with the child \u201chand over hand\u201d to demonstrate how to perform a task, and then celebrating each small achievement so that the toddler will want to incorporate the skills into their normal routine.\u00a0 Each visit not only helps the child learn, but also teaches the parents how to engage with him or her to gain the most traction and effectiveness.<\/p>\n
So how do you take a child\u2019s hand and help them stack a block when you\u2019re not allowed to go to their home?\u00a0 That wasn\u2019t an easy problem to solve.<\/p>\n
For people like me \u2013 who have used collaboration technology all of our lives \u2013 it is relatively easy to manipulate the technology and tools to share content and instruct over video.\u00a0 But for Helen \u2013 a technical novice \u2013 and one that has to teach someone under three years old \u2013 how could she adapt to a distance education model that would keep the attention of the child, maintain effective education, and do all of that without getting bogged down in needing to learn or adjust a lot of technical controls.<\/p>\n
Well, it turns out (because she was sheltering-in-place with a spouse in the industry) that it didn\u2019t have to be that hard at all.\u00a0 Instead of using a cheap or device-built-in webcam, she was able to borrow and use my Poly Studio on calls with her little students and their parents.<\/p>\n
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In her words, it was \u201ca game changer.\u201d\u00a0 The device\u2019s wide field of view enabled her to demonstrate the proper ways to manipulate toys and educational materials to properly teach the child.\u00a0 In addition, The Studio\u2019s ability to automatically track her as she moved around the room meant she could concentrate 100% on the therapeutic interaction without worrying if her activities took her out of frame or required an adjustment \u2013 they never would.\u00a0 No matter where she moved, what she grabbed, or how she manipulated it, the Studio would never let her get out of shot, never let her speech be muffled and never fail to let her hear every response from her little students and their parents.\u00a0 For anyone of us who have been on videoconference calls with a cheap or embedded camera, we know that quality and clarity is often not the case.<\/p>\n
Interestingly, after using the Poly Studio for a few weeks, she reported that many of her students were actually getting more out of the sessions than they would have from her in person.\u00a0 Obviously, her remote interactions with the children were more limiting. \u00a0However, by not being there in person, it was forcing the parents to be more involved in the educational process \u2013 which is the ultimate goal of the Early Intervention visits anyway \u2013 to provide the knowledge to the parents so that they can effectively incorporate the educational methods into the family\u2019s daily life.<\/p>\n
So the big conclusions to take away from this real-life case-study are:<\/p>\n
1) Not every videoconferencing camera \/ sound bar is made the same \u2013 and those differences matter.<\/p>\n
2) I\u2019m really, really proud of my wife \u2013 she can keep her seat in the captain\u2019s chair \u2013 she deserves it.<\/p>\n
Take a look at me interviewing my wife \u2013 and her demonstrating the use of the Poly Studio \u2013 in my \u201cUC and Collaboration Supports The New Normal\u201d webcast here<\/span>.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Those of you who regularly read my blogs know I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":4175,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1623,536,548],"tags":[130,131,1591,234,132,133,44,1638,122,230,1639,126,215,128],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4173"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4173\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}