Faraway Field Trips? They’re Right in Classroom

By Paul Westmoore

The fourth-graders at Lewiston-Porter Intermediate Education Center visited Alaska this spring and talked with a couple that raises and trains dogs to pull dog sleds.

A class of Barker High School students in June went to Columbus, Ohio, to view an autopsy and discuss what they saw with an educator from the Center of Science and Industry there.

And next April in Niagara Falls, Niagara Street Elementary School’s fourth-graders will travel to Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia to find out what it was like to be a soldier in the Revolutionary War.

When these young people see these places, they do it without leaving their classroom. Their schools don’t have to pay more than $75 to $200 per trip to visit a local site, and not much more to go out of town.

That’s because these trips constitute a new wave of Internet educational experiences called the Virtual Field Trip & Distance Learning Sites program, said Joseph J. Steinmetz, coordinator of curriculum and instruction for the Orleans-Niagara Board of Cooperative Educational Services. The Orleans-Niagara BOCES makes the field trips available to school districts.

Within the last year, teachers from at least six Niagara County school districts have started taking their students on interactive trips where they see things in real time and can see and speak with the educators, guides or officials who are their virtual tour guides, he said.

The Starpoint School District started the ball rolling last fall, and the Niagara Falls, North Tonawanda, Lockport, Royalton- Hartland and Barker school districts joined the program this spring.

Lew-Port Intermediate School pupils, however, are the veterans here. Their teachers have been taking them on virtual trips ever since their school received a $10,000 grant to obtain the technology in 2001.

Steinmetz said he expects that more and more schools will be using such virtual experiences for students.

Darlene R. Sprague, the Niagara Falls School District’s information services director, said, “It’s a great program because you can expose kids to places they may never otherwise be able to get to. It gives them a chance to see interesting things and talk to experts about them.

“When Niagara Street’s fourth-graders take a virtual trip to Williamsburg next April, they’ll get a real Revolutionary War experience. They’ll enlist in the 2nd Virginia Regiment with young recruit Nathaniel Hutchinson and experience the everyday life of a soldier during the Revolution. They’ll march into battle with Nathaniel as he encounters, for the first time, the noise, confusion and horror of war,” Sprague said.

Mary Ellen Auerli, the library-media specialist at Lew-Port Intermediate School who has been running her school’s virtual program since 2001, said third-graders this year took the fascinating Kigluait Education Adventure “Mushing in Alaska.”

“They actually got to meet a couple who raise and train mushing dogs. They got to see the dogs, and it was really great. It was almost like being right there,” she said. “It’s a live exchange. We could see them, and they could see us, and the students asked them questions.”

What makes the trips even more invaluable, she said, is that each is tied to the curriculum. So in the case of the Alaskan trip, “the kids were studying the climate of Alaska in their science curriculum, which made the whole trip that much more meaningful.”

She said the teachers in her school took 45 virtual trips this year, including one to a sanctuary for retired elephants from zoos and circuses. “They . . . live on thousands of acres,” she said. “It’s an amazing place.”

Steinmetz said the 2007-08 virtual experience is just the beginning. “We anticipate a big surge in this type of activity,” he said.

“It’s practical, and the kids can be right there and see everything on a 6-foot screen during a 40-minute period. They can speak with the people in charge of the trip and ask them questions,” Steinmetz said.

“It would take a whole day to bus a class to, say, the Buffalo Zoo and back. It would also cost a lot more money when you can do that virtually for less than $200, about the same thing it would cost for a one-way bus trip there.”

e-mail: pwestmoore@buffnews.com

Originally published by NEWS NIAGARA BUREAU.

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