Source: tmcnet.com
By: Amy Crawford
This year, students at Benjamin Franklin School have visited the North Pole, learned aboriginal dances in Australia and met with NASA scientists — all without leaving Uniontown.
Though the budget rarely allows for field trips these days, students in the Fayette County school have traveled the world through video conferencing.
“The funding is not there for multiple field trips,” said Mary Wallace, who began using the technology in her third-grade classroom last year and expanded it to the entire school this year. “This totally breaks down the barriers of where we can go.” As recession-strapped school districts trim their budgets, virtual field trips are becoming more and more popular. While a traditional field trip might include transportation costs, tickets and a day of lost class time, virtual field trips are inexpensive after the initial investment in cameras, microphones and computer hardware.
This year, the Westmoreland Intermediate Unit, the agency that oversees the county’s 17 school districts, received a $325,000 grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Education. The money will be used to purchase portable video-conferencing equipment for every public school district, the county’s three vocational schools and the Diocese of Greensburg’s Catholic schools.
“We want to have the equipment up and running by the beginning of the school year,” said Tim Hammill, the intermediate unit’s supervisor for educational technology.
Schools will not only use the equipment for field trips, Hammill said, but for distance-learning classes and collaboration between students and teachers at different schools. It also will allow the intermediate unit and participating schools to stream high-definition video.
Greater Latrobe purchased video-conferencing equipment for all of its schools last spring using a grant from the McFeely-Rogers Foundation. Today, students are traveling virtually to unlikely places.
Jennifer LeVan, who teaches anatomy and physiology at Greater Latrobe Senior High School, took her class on a virtual field trip to Cleveland, where they watched an autopsy with students from four other schools.
“I thought it was really cool that you could go over a whole state to see this,” said senior Brittany Cavallo, 18.
In fact, teachers and students are finding that they can do more with video-conferencing than they could with real-life field trips.
“It goes far beyond the field trip to the zoo,” said Ruth Blankenbaker, executive director of the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration, a nonprofit that connects teachers with content for video conferences.
Since its online launch in 2004, Blankenbaker said, the center’s membership has increased to more than 10,000 schools. Recently, more than 750 schools have signed up every month, triple last year’s rate.
Barbara Holtz, a librarian in McKeesport Area High School, began organizing video conferences for teachers this year. Programs on Spanish and Indian art, offered by the Cleveland Museum of Art, have been among the most popular.
“The kids seem to love it,” Holtz said. “We could never take them to Cleveland.” Dale Hilton, the director of distance learning for the Cleveland Museum, said that the museum conducts more than 900 video-conferences every year, with students in 26 states, England and Canada.
“We’re seeing greater numbers of participants each year,” Hilton said. “We are very proud of our collection, and we are proud to be able to share it.” At Benjamin Franklin, Mary Wallace said she was glad of the opportunity as well.
“The exposure to other cultures that these kids are getting!” she said. “Sometimes they don’t see beyond Fayette County, but there is so much out there.”
