Learning in high definition

Without leaving their schools over the past three years, elementary students in New Berlin have visited the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, learned about immigration issues at the Cincinnati Museum Center and asked a physicist in Ohio how far light travels in one year.

By using a couple of televisions, a camera or two and a space-age looking digital receiver, the physicist in Ohio and the kids in Wisconsin could hear and see each other in real-time. So when asked about the speed of light, the man got some paper and a calculator and proceeded to teach the third-graders how to use exponents and solve the equation.

"That's what's so great about video conferencing," said Kevin Messman, the New Berlin Public School District's coordinator of instructional technology, recalling the session. "Kids are getting a chance to interact with an expert they wouldn't normally have access to."

Used since the late 1970s in Wisconsin as a mechanism for students in rural areas to participate in more diverse or challenging classes offered by other districts, video conferencing is becoming more popular for teachers who want to enhance their curricula by hooking up classes of students with experts around the country or world.

Many districts, such as those in Milwaukee, Oak Creek, Thiensville and Mequon, as well as many private schools, have had the capability to video conference for years, but New Berlin instructional resource teacher Lisa Conway indicated that many teachers are just now starting to regularly seek out opportunities on their own that capitalize on the technology's potential for virtual field trips and interactive interviews.

In response, museums, research centers and government agencies around the country are developing and refining interactive, 45- to 90-minute programs that arrive digitally in schools on a TV screen or projector and engage students in anything from meteorology to open heart surgery. The necessary technology usually costs from $5,000 to $10,000. "It's frustrating because when we say distance-learning, there's still this big fear that it's going to be one-way, like watching television," said Daniel Gross, the executive director of the Southeastern Wisconsin Instructional Network Group, a cooperative service agency that helps manage video conferencing in local public and private schools.

"Instead, you go to the average teacher and say, 'Step away from your textbook. What are you teaching? Hawaii? OK, why don't we connect you to someone there?' "

One popular video conference offered by the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, "Live from the Heart," takes 3,000 students a year into the Advocate Christ Medical Center for open heart surgery, during which surgeons talk with their teenage audience while deftly going about their bypasses.

Sarah Tschaen, the museum's senior education coordinator, said demand has grown for the program, which costs $240 and includes pre- and post-surgery activity plans.

"We have great participation from Wisconsin - usually five or six schools every year," Tschaen said. "A lot of the participants are upper-level high schoolers thinking about doing this for a career, and so it's great for them to be able to ask questions during the surgery."

Some cost, some are free
Video conference programs offered by most museums cost around $125, said Jason Dennison, who started video conferencing with schools at the Milwaukee Public Museum in 2003. Now a coordinator at the Cincinnati Museum Center in Ohio, Dennison has connected as easily to a tiny school off the southern coast of Japan as he has to schools in Wisconsin.

"How else would those kids get firsthand information about the native American Indian tribes that inhabited Wisconsin?" Dennison asked of the Japanese students, who talked with him through a translator.

Many government agencies, meanwhile, offer video conferences with schools for free.

In a large group session next month, officials at NASA will link up with Poplar Creek and Ronald Reagan Elementary students in New Berlin to talk about the solar system. In a more individualized session this winter, three sixth-grade girls at New Berlin's Elmwood Elementary crowded around the television to solicit information from Judy Beck, who works under the Environmental Protection Agency as the Lake Michigan manager of the Great Lakes National Program in Chicago.

"It went for an hour and a half," said the girls' teacher, Pat Morrissey, "and every question they had about Lake Michigan was answered. It was so much more engaging than phone calls and e-mails."

Source: www.journalsentinel.com