How MediaTech’s Virtual Table Top – VTT™ can Improve Your Disaster Preparedness Training

  • VTT™ will lower operational and training costs
  • VTT™ is cost-effective and there is no wear on resources or ancillary costs
  • VTT™ will increase the number of fully trained personnel
  • VTT™ scenes are fully customizable and it is very easy to create objective-based exercises using buildings and locations from your own community
  • VTT™ allows you to train for 21st Century threats and priorities

Schools Need to Do more training!

Sandy Hook School Probably Well Prepared as Heroes Emerge After Massacre

By: Jim McKay

There are many more questions than answers about the shooting that took the lives of 20 kids and six administrators at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14. But in general schools and businesses can and should examine their emergency plans and how they would respond, not only during a shooting, but also during various potential hazards.

Emergency plans should be for all hazards, not just for an active shooter situation and should include trainings that incorporate everyone associated with that school or business, according to Bo Mitchell of 911 Consulting.

“The chilling fact is it’s happened before and it will happen again,” Mitchell said. “One danger here is that we always prepare for the last crisis, so we are all preparing for Hurricane Sandy and the Newtown, Conn., massacre. Both are devastating, but employers have to prepare for all hazards — bomb threats, suspicious packages, bullying at work and bullying at school are examples.”

Mitchell said schools are employers first and most employers, including schools, are not well prepared. “For every one organization that is well planned and trained and exercised, there are 10 that are not,” he said. “Every employee has a legal right to review their employers’ emergency plan. That’s federal law.”

Mitchell said schools and businesses all have the same problem: they think they are well prepared but they’re not. He says there is ample research, done by the Government Accountability Office, the National Association of School Resource Officers and other national organizations that point to a lack of preparedness for K-12 schools and businesses.

The research shows that most schools have paperwork they call a plan but it’s not all hazards and they don’t train all their employees as required by federal law. “They’ll train “the team” but they don’t train all employees and for emergency purposes that’s the contractors, the cafeteria staff, the security people and grandma who volunteers in the gift shop,” Mitchell said.

“They should train coaches, temps, volunteers, everyone because when something goes wrong all those people will be considered employees at court, even if they didn’t get a paycheck.”

Mitchell said research indicates that schools aren’t well prepared because they don’t exercise. “Table top exercises, full-scale exercises done with and without emergency services in concert. Both are great and more is better and they aren’t doing it,” he said. “Some of this is ‘Oh, we’ll scare the children or we’ll scare the parents.’ That’s bull. Locking down a school is very difficult, but that doesn’t alleviate your responsibility to do that.”

The ‘Plan’

Every school principal will answer in the affirmative when asked if his/her school has a disaster plan. But is that plan being exercised or is it “on the shelf?”

“A lot of it is on the shelf, a lot of it isn’t all hazards, a lot of it isn’t trained,” Mitchell said. “OHSA [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration} says school is a workplace. It says before you’re a school, you’re a workplace and every employee shall be trained in emergency planning, annually in a classroom. This is not happening on a wide spectrum from Maine to California.”

The reasons vary, from lack of education, to politics to denial and of course, a lack of resources.

The feeling that “it won’t happen to us” is ubiquitous in the U.S., including schools and businesses. Couple that with the fact that school administrators aren’t emergency managers and parents of students going to those schools may not know what questions to ask those administrators about emergency plans and it equals lack of preparation.

“Public schools tend to turn to their police chiefs and fire chiefs, which is all well and good but they’re busy people and if all schools showed up at the police and fire departments, the system would collapse,” Mitchell said.

He also said politics play a role in that police and fire aren’t going to go to parents because they’d be going over the heads of boards of education. And boards of education are reluctant to turn to parents because they’re busy running schools and taking on security too is a daunting thought.

Mitchell said parents should ask school administrators if they have a plan, if it’s all hazards, if it conforms to the National Fire Protection Association 1600 Standard on Disaster/Emergency Management and Business Continuity Programs, and have they trained it annually in a classroom and have you trained enough people, including the grandma in the gift shop.

Mitchell said that as time goes on we’ll probably be looking at Sandy Hook as a school that was well prepared and look at the administrators who lost their lives as heroes. School administrators ran toward the gunman as they heard shots and teachers hid students while leaving themselves vulnerable.

“I have a feeling we’re going to find out they were well trained and well exercised and those six women who died were heroes,” he said. “They knew what to do and in so doing probably kept this from getting a lot worse, which is very cold comfort to those 20 kids who died.”

Permission to use or reference this story given with attribution and a link:
http://www.emergencymgmt.com/safety/Sandy-Hook-School-Probably-Well-Prepared.html

E-Learning in the manufacturing sector

By: John C. White
President/COO

E-Learning in the manufacturing sector

Minimizes Time Away from Work:

IndustryElearning

Computer-based training yields timesaving’s of 35-45% over traditional classroom instruction. In addition, it has been found that computer-based training required significantly less time than instructor-lead training. The reduction in time ranges from 20- 80% with 40-60% being the most common time saved. In fact compression of training time has the most visible impact on ROI by not only providing savings in wages spent on training but also a saving in opportunity costs. An example of this is as follows:

A company needs to put 200 of its employees through a course in plant safety that takes one week. If the average hourly wage is $15 an hour then the wage cost of training alone (excluding travel costs and time, opportunity costs, instructor cost, etc) would be 200 X $15 X 40 = $120,000. If all other factors remain equal, a 40% reduction in time saves $48,000. This alone has a significant impact on R.O.I., however, this impact can be relatively small when compared to the effect of documented savings in opportunity costs. Opportunity costs are the cost incurred by the company when production or sales are reduced due to employee absenteeism. Thus, if the 200 employees produce 10 units a day, the total loss for the week is 50 units. If each unit then nets the company $5,000 in revenue, the total in lost revenue would be $250,000. Again if all factors remain equal, a 40% reduction in training time would net $150,000 in lost opportunity savings. This is approximately three times the savings in wages alone.

In addition to compression of training time, MediaTech’s web-based e-Learning products are available 24-7 and can be accessed by your employees at times that further reduce opportunity costs.  Add to this the fact that training programs can be monitored and validated to a much greater degree as compared to traditional training, the value proposition of computer-based training products is clear.

Virtual safety training from Centerville company – MediaTech VTT™

May 7, 2013

Virtual safety training from Centerville company
By Michael Schaffer Managing Editor The Daily Iowegian
Tue May 07, 2013, 06:14 AM CDT

Friday morning several local public officials and Iowa Rep. Dave Loebsack were given an in-depth look at a virtual training public safety program developed by Centerville-based MediaTech.

John “Rocky” White, MediaTech president and COO, guided visitors through a PowerPoint presentation describing the “Virtual Table Top” software program, described the software and answered questions.

John Arnold, MediaTech product and sales development representative, assisted in answering questions and describing the program.

“VTT” is a web-based tool for conducting enhanced table top exercises. Facilitators and users add custom backgrounds specific to individual locations, place objects features, roads, hazards and equipment in a scene to visualize an emergency scenario and appropriate response actions.

Emergency scenarios “VTT” can replicates includes fires, plane crashes, tornadoes, traffic accidents, chemical spills, chemical explosions, mud slides, active shooters … or just about anything the mind can think of in terms of manmade or natural disasters.

“VTT” can be programed to simulate emergency scenarios so law enforcement, fire, emergency management, city, county, schools, hospitals, business and even private individuals can actually anticipate for and have a plan in place to deal with a tactical, operational or strategic response.

Rep. Loebsack was impressed.

“It’s as close as you are going to get to a simulation with what you have” Loebsack said.  “I mean, this is fantastic.  I’m really glad I was able to see this.”

Local officials attending were Centerville Police Chief, Tom Demry, Centerville Fire Chief, Mike Bogle, Dien Judge, Loebsack’s south east Iowa district representative, Becky Maxwell, Daily Iowegian Publisher, Jim Senior, Centerville Mayor, Dean Kaster, Appanoose County Supervisor, and Mike Lamb ADLM Emergency Management Coordinator.

MediaTech was founded in 2003.  They have more than 4,000 hours of learning courseware, more than 1,000 different scenarios, and 4,000 user account spread across the United States.

Larger users of MediaTech products include the federal government, Cargill, Musco Lighting, and Wells Fargo.

White said 25 percent of emergency managers go “bananas” with “VTT” software. They’ve been looking for something like this,”
White said.  “They work with their police station.  They work with their hospital.  They work with their schools.  They work with their fire station regularly.  Regularly doing drills at various locations and are very interested in the program.

Arnold said, “VTT” is a way to get people to think about security scenarios.

“We try to create things that could actually happen and get people to think about how they would respond,” Arnold said.

For more information contact MediaTech http://www.mediatechinc.com/?p=503

Original article available at dailyiowegian.com

Introducing VTT™

The Virtual Table Top – VTT™ is a web-based tool for conducting enhanced table top exercises.  Facilitators and users can import custom background images, place terrain features, roads, hazards, and equipment on a 3D street grid to visualize the scenario and response actions.

Call or email today for a free Trial vtt@mediatechinc.com or call 641-856-8052

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Click here for an interactive overview of VTT™

Some of the Benefits of VTT™:

Free: Training
Economical: Lower operational and training costs
Cost-Effective: No wear on resources or ancillary costs
Efficient: Increase number of fully trained personnel
Effective: Improve and maintain necessary level of skill
Comprehensive: All-Hazards, All-Agencies applications
Relevant: Train for 21st Century threats and priorities
High-Impact: Experience instills maximum retention
Customizable: Easily create objectives-based exercises
Practical: Gain experience using familiar scenes
Repeatable: Train and retrain for enhanced performance
Convenient: Train regularly with no operational disruptions
Measurable: Objective scoring and assessment
Compliant: NIMS, HSEEP, OHSA
Secure: Train confidentially in a protected environment
Safe: Protect your most valuable assets – your People

Call or email today for a free Trial vtt@mediatechinc.com or call 641-856-8052

The Easiest, Most Effective

Way to Visualize Your

Disaster Plan

VTT - All Hazards

Economically Priced (as low as $500 for your whole organization)

SIGN UP TODAY TO START YOUR

FREE TRIAL

 vtt@mediatechinc.com
or call 641-856-8052
Plan, Prepare, and Train with VTT™

Our Virtual Table Top – VTT™ revolutionizes the tabletop exercise, giving you the power to visualize scenarios, injects, and participant responses quickly and effectively. Includes 100s of custom objects for visualizing emergency scenarios and fully localized situations. Airport, Chemical/Biological Attack, Earthquake, Fire, HAZMAT, Arson/Sabotage, Flooding, Pipeline Explosion, Hurricane, Pandemic, Active Shooter, Tornado/Wind shear, Train Derailment/wreck, Hostage/Intruder, Major Event Planning, After Action Reviews and more.

—Ask about educational pricing and discounts for county, regional and state level purchases—

MediaTech Accessibility Testing

Accessibility requirements are a fact of life today. If you haven’t begun auditing your systems and websites to determine their compliance with accessibility standards such as Section 508 and WCAG, MediaTech can help.

We can assist your organization by conducting accessibility audits that identify and prioritize all accessibility errors, define the method for addressing any issues, and document overall compliance with Section 508.

Some compliance testing firms tout their proprietary automated testing tools. We too employ a suite of tools to accomplish our work. There are many aspects of the Section 508 regulations, however, that cannot be tested without human interaction and input. This is where our expert staff comes in, providing thorough manual testing at both the usability and the code levels. We will put your software through its paces using current assistive technologies (e.g., JAWS, Kurzweil, Voice Over, NVDA, SAMMNET, MAGIC, ZoomText, etc.,) and examine your code in order to provide detailed, targeted feedback to assist your organization with accessible development.

If you want, we can take the service further, and let our crack development team make the needed changes to your applications to bring them into compliance. Whatever your organizationneeds, we stand ready to make it happen.

Call or email us today to talk about your accessibility solution!