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Island-Hopping and Mushing via Web 2.0

A few schools are beginning to tap Web 2.0 tools for multimedia communication to give their students vivid educational experiences.

Educators in Ventura County, in Southern California, and the Bering Straits district, in Alaska, are both working in this vein, though with different twists.

Ventura County has partnered with the National Park Service to connect students to nature on the hard-to-visit Channel Islands, 14 miles off the coast of Southern California, according to Catharine Reznicek, an educational technology specialist in the county’s office of education, who was presenting at the Consortium for School Networking conference last week.

The islands, a national park surrounded by a marine sanctuary, have biodiversity that can be compared to that of the Galapagos, said Reznicek.

For Channel Islands Live, park service divers conduct underwater tours, with video captured on submersible cameras and broadcast live to students, usually gathered in school cafeterias; the students in turn can ask the divers questions. In a related project, the “EagleCAM” on one of the islands sends a live Web video feed of the activities of nesting bald eagles, with audio via a microphone mounted beneath the nest.

The broadcasts from the remote site are made possible by a 18 mile point-to-point microwave link from Anacapa Island to the mainland. The county office, which provides Internet service for 21 school districts, set up the system beginning in April 2008, according to Steve Carr, the education office’s executive director of technology.

“Our goal was to use content to sell the technology,” Carr said. “While we were working on technological solutions, we were trying to do exciting content.”

Costs of the communications system were subsidized by the federal E-rate program. The Webcam project received funds from a legal settlement involving a chemical company that had accused of releasing the pesticide DDT into local waters and harming the bald eagle population, Mr. Carr said.

Broadcasting Alaska

The Bering Straits project–in a school district of 16 villages spread across a territory the size of Great Britain, with water barriers and no connecting roads–puts the cameras in students’ hands.

“We’re taking very remote communities of our students and connecting them to outside world,” John Concilus, the director of educational technology, said in his presentation.

To cross one expanse of sea, the district’s Internet provider set up a 32 mile microwave link.

The district’s schools already had robust wireless networks, which they use to take part in 2-way video conferences with sites, such as the squid lab at the Alaska sea life center, a farm, and medical centers, where students have witnessed open-heart and knee replacement surgeries and autopsies.

The experiences are complemented by learning resources that students and teachers compile and key to district academic standards on a wiki. Students have also created a multimedia visual dictionary, including pronunciation in indigenous languages.

District students also cater to a broader audience through documentaries they have produced on local activities, such as whaling.

An annual highlight is students’ coverage of the annual Iditarod Trail Sled Dog  Race, now  under way, which traverses the district. Student broadcasters become part of the entourage of the race, interviewing the mushers and reporting on each day’s events, using a popup satellite dish, a remote steerable Webcam on a pole, and other equipment hauled by a snow machine on a custom-built sled.

On the district’s IditaProject wiki, students post information on the history and culture of mushing, statistics they have compiled about the race, and a customized Google Earth map that allows visitors to track the mushers.

The site has a global audience, and the related IditaProject Forum, which the district started in the project’s first year, has received over 17000 posts worldwide.

“By allowing our students to create content for a real audience and get credit toward our standards, it’s very powerful for teachers and their students,” Concilus said of the project.

© 2009 Digital Education Today.