• Fiber would give us better opportunities to educate new doctors via more interactive teaching methods. We could even go so far as to have area doctors and the work they do be much more visible to our younger students through live remote "job shadowing" sessions.
  
  
• Families connected with Google Fiber would have better access to healthy living/eating/etc. advice and community support networks (including those for drug and alcohol abuse and other illnesses)
  
  
• Imagine this: Teachers give assignments and take, organize, and grade students' work online. This eliminates so much organizational overhead that teachers will be able to focus *much* more on *teaching*!  It also promotes the availability and quality of feedback on a child's progress.
  
  
• Tools that facilitate high-yield discussion like Google Moderator would provide a more visible, more effective way for students to ask questions in class. The discussions wouldn't have to be limited to single classrooms, either, allowing for a more consistent quality of education from school to school.
  
  
• These online collaberation tools serve many great roles in our community individually, but together they bring about at least two more incredible opportunities:
  
  
• 1) to prepare our students and our citizens for the workforce of the 21st Century; and
  
  
• 2) to bring the vital and noble effort to educate our children as close to the home as we can, fostering increased parental involvement in the education process.
  
  
• I believe that if we prepare our kids for the "real world" by teaching them how to organize and locate information in the information age, they can develop cognitive organizational skills far superior on average to those of previous generations. This could improve our children's academic performance later in life and their standings for competitive 21st Century jobs.
  
  
• Fiber broadband would make feasible or practical a whole host of new global communication channels for the classroom, facilitating a new era of exchanging ideas between even the youngest students from all over the world. (This, as Google develops a voice translation service to break down our language barriers the way the internet is breaking down our physical barriers.... the possibilities are simply mind-numbing!)
  
  
• With fiber in the home, our teachers could still deliver a world-class education to students even when circumstances outside our control may have impeded it in the past, as in the case of extended inclimate weather (something to which we're no strangers here in West Virginia), or homebound students, who may be physically spread throughout the city and difficult to reach with our limited physical resources.
  
  
• Fiber in Huntington could allow Marshall University to have an increased presence in our K-12 education system. I think everybody's a winner when that happens.

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