Verizon Wireless 2011 Annual Report Download - page 21

VERIZON COMMUNICATIONS INC. 2011 ANNUAL REPORT
Verizon provided St. Philip’s Academy in
Newark, NJ, with a VGo telepresence robot
to solve a variety of classroom challenges,
including helping a homebound student
stay involved with his teachers and peers
while recovering from medical treatments.
The VGo robot
was developed
with support from
the Verizon LTE
Innovation Center.
Making Education Accessible to Those Who Need It Most
Using technology to prepare students for success in the 21st century
economy has long been a focus of the Verizon Foundation. For example,
in partnership with some of the world’s most reputable cultural and sci-
entic institutions, we developed an educational website, Thinknity,
to provide interactive learning materials for K-12 teachers and students.
Today, Thinknity is one of the most visited sites of its kind.
As we go forward,content from our Thinknitypartners will be a vital
component of a more comprehensive strategy to use technology
to change the model for education, becoming part of an integrated
solution that combines its free content with smartphones and tablet
computers for use by educators and students. By providing them
with this new set of tools — and the training on how to use them for
educational purposes — we believe we can be even more eective
in empowering teachers and students to achieve measurable success.
Looking ahead, we believe our rapid deployment of 4G LTE mobile
networks will be a game changer in education, as it is across the econ-
omy. As entrepreneurs and developers embed 4G LTE connections in
a whole new category of mobile devices, the Verizon Foundation is
working on a number of projects to adapt these new technologies in a
variety of social environments.
One promising technology is known as “robotic telepresence.” A com-
pany called VGo — one of our collaborators at our LTE Innovation Center
in Waltham, MA — manufactures small interactive robots enabled with
4G LTE connectivity. With the speed and coverage of 4G LTE, the VGo
robot allows a person in one place to extend his or her presence to a
distant location — moving independently throughout the whole envi-
ronment and interacting face-to-face via real-time videoconferencing.
At St. Philip’s Academy in Newark, NJ, this revolution has already begun.
One of the Academy’s students has been conned to his home while
he recovers from cancer treatments. With the VGo robot, he can actu-
ally go to school, move from class to class, answer a teacher’s question
or talk with his classmates over lunch. The same technology could also
be used to enable face-to-face meetings between teachers and par-
ents, take students on educational tours of museums in distant cities or
bring Nobel prize winners into the classroom for personal interaction.
The Verizon Foundation started a pilot program to place 15 VGo robots
in institutions nationwide to explore their various uses, some of which
could have broad social and commercial applications. We see this new,
more personalized form of robotics having the potential to transform
the retail shopping experience, allow more workers to telecommute
and enable doctors to see patients many miles away.
Technology provides new ways of thinking about social issues and
new tools for solving them. We’re using philanthropy to plant the
seeds of innovation and cultivate the creative thinking that will spread
the benets of technology broadly across society.
To view the Verizon Corporate Responsibility report online featuring
additional content, go to responsibility.verizon.com/2011.
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