May 2009

Tina Quick knows a lot about moving. And she's putting it to use to help others to make their transitions--often recommending Skype to help make their landings soft.

The Boston area entrepreneur notes: "As the daughter of a U.S. Air Force man and the wife of an international public health physician, I made 18 moves (nine of them before my 10th birthday), lived in eight different states, six countries and four continents.

There's more: "My husband (Jono, a public health doctor and himself a Skype power user) and I raised three daughters in Asia, Africa and Europe over the course of 15 years. When we returned to the U.S. I decided to put my expertise to work and started a small consultancy."

She describes in this Skype video how her Winchester, Mass. firm International Family Transitions helps people, especially people who have been relocated internationally to pursue their educations or careers or to follow their spouses or parents, make these often difficult transitions as ex-pats and also as re-pats.

She said Skype audio and video can help these folks adjust to moving far from home or coming back.

Tina notes: "I have been doing seminars and workshops for educators, United Nations groups and international schools. I particularly enjoy working with international students to prepare them for the transition experience of going off to university, particularly if they are returning to their 'home' country."

Oprah Winfrey talks to Josh Silverman

For the past year, Skype has enabled The Oprah Winfrey Show to talk face-to-face with anybody, anywhere, at anytime.

We've been tremendously inspired watching Oprah use Skype video to connect with everyday people, celebrities, and even animals on her show. In fact, did you see Oprah last week? Oprah had a Skype video call with a huge grizzly bear. (Now, that's a first.)

This week, we're expecting to see Oprah push the limits with Skype even further. Watch Josh Silverman, President of Skype, make an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Thursday, May 21st as part of the "Where the Skype are You?" episode. It's going to be a fascinating Skype adventure not to be missed as Oprah takes viewers to some surprising places over Skype video.

Check out the video teaser on Oprah.com.

Sterling (Kan.) may be far from the big city. But an innovative team at Sterling High School has brought the world to Kansas via Skype.

Recently, U.S. history teacher Brian Richter decided to see if he could get World war II hero and former Kansas Sen. Bob Dole to speak to his class.

Dole's "people" suggested a teleconference.

But Brian noted: "We don't even have phones in the classroom. But we do have the internet."

Brian enlisted the help of Dean Mantz, the school's network coordinator.

Dean contacted Sen. Dole's office in Washington. He won the Dole people over to try Skype as a less expensive and practical alternative to the reach the classroom.

Dole made his first Skype call ever on April 29.

Brian said the aura of technology lent by Skype probably made the call even more exciting for his kids, who were in fourth grade when Dole ran unsuccessfully for president against Bill Clinton.

Dean said Dole seemed to enjoy the experience, making his usual humorous comments, such as wondering aloud if a reporter who was moving around the classroom actually was looking for an exit.

He said he has used Skype for other educational programs, such as to link with a classroom in Australia and to bring in educators from the Kansas Cosmosphere & Space Center, a major space museum in Hutchinson, Kan.

Next, Brian and Dean are planning a student Senate with another school--all on Skype.

Military families often use Skype video and audio to stay in touch.

But it will be hard to top Linda Lawrence's story of giving birth in Camden, N.J., while her husband Andrew, an Army medic, watched over Skype video as he awaited deployment to Iraq at Fort Lewis, Wash.

On the Friday before Mother's Day, the Courier Post reported: "Linda gave birth to Brayden Andrew Lawrence, with her mother and best friend in the room, and her husband watching via a webcam sitting on a table to her left."

"It was great. It was the next best thing to having him in the room," Linda Lawrence said, speaking of her husband.

"To me, it was just amazing how everything worked," Andrew Lawrence said. "The experience was wonderful. I saw everything, heard every sound, saw the baby come out."

Brayden was the couple's third son, their first covered on Skype.

Good Morning America Health reported on how doctors are bringing back the house call "virtually " on Skype.

Host Tanya Rivero brought New York plastic surgeon Spero Theodorou and one of his patients into the GMA studio physically while Dr. Loren Olson, a child psychiatrist from Iowa "Skype-d" in.

Dr. Theodorou said his young patients "practically live on the internet." And they're time crunched.

So he said it was natural to offer initial educational and screening consultations over the net.

One of his liposuction patients said she uses Skype everyday for teleconferencing so it was easy for her to meet with the doctor initially over Skype. She said this saved her a trip to the MD office and spared her from the waiting room,

Dr. Loren Olson, about whom I blogged last month, told how he uses Skype to keep up with his grandchildren in Washington State and Ohio.

From there, he brought Skype into his practice. He said Skype comes in handy for routine follow-up visits and for consultations in distant areas where he is working with a team. He told me Skype saved him "windshield time"--time driving he could be using to treat patients.

He said Skype video doesn't have the intimacy of a face-to-face visit. But he said, "The question is (between) this visit (on Skype) vs. no visit."

He said after patients are connected for a time over Skype video the "screen melts away" so the visit becomes more intimate.

Cleveland Browns Coach Eric Mangini is letting a new player into the huddle: Skype.

Jeff Schudel reports in the Morning Herald: "The Browns are going high-tech under Coach Eric Mangini. No matter how many miles they are apart, he will be only a computer click away from a face-to-face conversation with each of his players.

"Mangini and the Browns use a videoconferencing product known as Skype. It is a program that can be downloaded to a computer with a web cam or to a cellphone with video capabilities."

Coaches and players in professional sports spend a lot of time on the road. Mangini used Skype to stay in touch with his family.

Now he has adopted the tech to work with his players,

"(Skype is) very interactive," Mangini told the newspaper. "I think that will be a good tool. We've had some innovative uses of technology that I really didn't think I'd be using.

"George McDonald (offensive quality control coach) was using it for Mohamed (Massaquoi) or Brian (Robiskie) to go through information. I'm sure those guys are a little bummed out that we call them up and have videoconferences and go through the playbook, but I think it's a very good way to get some face-to-face time and go through that information.

Mangini views Skype as an excellent way to stay in touch with injured players.

Mangini was asked whether all his players already have Skype. "If they don't," he said, "they will."

This is a technology fairy tale.

It's about how two classrooms across town were connected via Skype video so that Nada Cuvalo's six-graders read stories inspired by Ann McNamara's third-graders.

The local paper, the Waltham (Mass.) Tribune described it as "Once upon a Skype: Students broadcast stories using Web cams."

The Tribune explained the process:

"The older children recently sent surveys to the younger children through the mail. The surveys asked third-graders a series of questions of what kinds of settings, characters and plots they would like to see in fairy tales. Third-graders answered the surveys, teachers mailed them back and Cuvalo's class wrote individual stories for them."

"We had never done anything like this before so we wanted to make sure it went smoothly," Sandra Malec, the school district tech expert, said. "The children were so enthusiastic about it. We were trying to explain to them what was going to happen and I don't think they knew what was going to happen until those sixth-graders came on the screen."

Cuvalo's class read excerpts from stories they wrote standing before a webcam. A question-and-answer session followed, when both classes interacted for the first time.

McNamara told the Tribune both teachers saw what each other looked like for the first time yesterday through Skype.

"This is the first time I'm collaborating with a teacher from a new school. It was a new experiment and it seemed fairly easy," McNamara said. "It was really a lot of fun."

What is it about Skype and fairy tales?

Professor Sugata Mitra, a technology education professor at Newcastle University in the UK, who was the inspiration for Academy Award-winning movie, "Slumdog Millionaire," is having British "grannies" tell fairy tales to kids in Indian slums. The goal is to improve their English.

Any else with Skype fairy tales to share? Let me know.

Dr. Jonathan D. "Jono" Quick's job is reaching out to 70 developing countries, deploying a staff of nearly 1,500 from 65 nationalities. As president and CEO of Cambridge, Mass.-based Management Sciences for Health, he is accustomed to working with people in remote locations, such as southern Sudan, Afghanistan and Haiti.

"We have a very mobile network of international staff on the move consulting in these countries," he said.
plays.

Jono said: "Skype has been revolutionary for those of us working in international development."

He shares the important role Skype audio plays to his org in this Skype video.

He said he uses Skype regularly to:

--"Provide the audio link for parts of our Quarterly Global Staff meetings in which we have staff from the home offices in Cambridge and Washington, and field staff from usually 15 to 20 countries together on the line for a 75 minutes virtually meeting. To give an example, we had one global meeting chaired from Boston in which the speakers were myself on Skype from a hotel room in Pakistan, our team from Malawi via Skype, and our office in Washington.

--"Arrange conference calls in which we originate the call with a Cambridge-based computer, but then use a combination of Skype out and computer-to-computer Skype to link staff who may be in their office in Vietnam (we had one call in which the person went back and forth between their local cell phone on Skype out within Vietnam and their computer)."

He expects as people become more used to video, it will be incorporated into his staff conferences.

MSH "takes an integrated approach to building high-impact sustainable programs that address critical challenges in leadership, health systems management, human resources, and medicines."

The organization says at its website:

"Our expertise in these areas falls into the broad categories of management functions--for example, leadership and governance or pharmaceutical management--and health areas like tuberculosis or maternal, newborn and child health."