NDLW Award Nominees: Support Program(s) for Education (by For-Profit organizations)

Award Category: Support Education FP
Name of Nominee: Cheryl Henshaw
Nominee’s Organization: TANDBERG

Description of why this nominee should receive the NDLW Award:
Cheryl Henshaw started with a vision; how schools with no access to funds could address a need. This need was to share information over vast expanses. Her vision evolved into a passion to interconnect students on a global scale for the purpose of revolutionizing traditional educational delivery models.

Initially, Cheryl channeled that passion by working with individual school sites and districts. Her commitment to acquiring funds to assist rural, isolated, impoverished schools led to the development of nationally recognized award winning projects. The birth of these projects transitioned to working on state and regional level to ignite a fire among multiple schools to pursue the avenues of education afforded through the effective implementation of videoconferencing tools in the classroom. She purposed her vision to help these schools find a way get the funding so desperately needed to acquire videoconferencing and the passion spread.

Cheryl knew that if the sites in her region were helped by the implementation of videoconferencing, there had to be countless schools across the nation with the same need. Her vision and passion became the foundation of Tandberg’s National Grant Services Department. Cheryl, at the helm of this team, oversees grants managers in every state. She realized that other organizations could benefit from the integration of videoconferencing into their fields. As a result, the National Grant Services Department Team from Tandberg has now expanded to encompass writing grants for first responders, fire-fighters, colleges, universities, Native American populations and health care.

Cheryl makes time volunteering her abilities assisting others in developing their grant writing teams. She provides knowledge and expertise, without remuneration to organizations desiring to pursue their initiatives. Her countless hours of searching, reviewing, planning and writing proposals continue to drive her forward. Cheryl Henshaw’s fervent determination is leading to changing communities one organization at a time.

Name of Nominee: AT&T KNE Collaboration Collage
Nominee’s Organization: AT&T

Description of why this nominee should receive the NDLW Award:
The AT&T Knowledge Network Explorer "Collaboration Collage" (also known as ed1vidconf) has been an important and lasting resource to educators seeking to establish video conferencing-based classroom collaboration and curriculum enrichment programs in their schools.

The "Collaboration Collage" is comprised of over 2,200 individuals who subscribe to an e-mail listserve which facilitates the seeking of subject-area experts, classroom collaborations, posting questions and the sharing successes or lessons learned. "Collaboration Collage" was one of the original resources that educators could rely on to establish video-conferencing programs in their schools and its concept was very innovative when it was first introduced in 1996 as it sought to harness "the power of us" - a key principle of Web 2.0 tools that are all the rage today.

The number of "Collaboration Collage" users continues to grow (the listserve subscriber base grew over 20% over the last 12 months), even as the number of internet-based resources dedicated to collaboration among educators has seen unprecedented growth in recent years.

The "Collaboration Collage" is just one resource of AT&T’s Knowledge Network Explorer website. The KNE website has been a well-known and respected within the education community for over 10 years and has been referenced in numerous articles and books, including these:

National School Board Assn list of Curriculum and Assessment resources and also Professional Development resources (http://www.nsba.org/sbot/toolkit/cnares.cfm, http://www.nsba.org/sbot/toolkit/PlDevRes.cfm)

January, 2005 eSchoolNews article mentions KNE as one of several sites selected for inclusion in a project to bring up math and science scores (http://www.eschoolnews.com/cic/fetc/blog/2005/01/000580.php)

Feb 1, 2006 article in BroadbandInfo.Com reviews KNE as a learning site (http://www.broadbandinfo.com/want-high-speed/providers/AT&T/educational-sites.html)

University of NC includes KNE in their 3000 "Best of the Web" educational sites (http://www.learnnc.org/bestweb/AT&Tkne) as do many, many others.

Recognized in the 2005 book, "101 Best Websites for Secondary Teachers" published by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). See http://www.kn.att.com/awards.html

We would like to nominate the AT&T Knowledge Network Explorer "Collaboration Collage" for the NDLW Award as a result its rich history in promoting the use of video-conferencing in education.

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