The disaster scenario erupted from a small monitor on the floor of Digital Studios in Schaumburg Monday, the audience of students and teachers riveted by a tale of destruction worthy of a disaster film.
An earthquake had ripped through the Midwest, one so strong that it caused the Mississippi River to flood, emptied the Great Lakes and fostered legions of insects that consumed any crops not drowned in the deluge.
It was only a video, but students and teachers from across Illinois were asked: What if it happened?
For the next hour and a half, that question and others were put to experts from NASA, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United Nations and the crew of the space shuttle Columbia. They were gathered–in person, via satellite or in pretaped interviews–for an interactive television show linked live to participating schools.
Under the guidance of TV journalist Bill Kurtis and the Illinois State Board of Education, the show was the state’s first major experiment with long-distance, multimedia learning.
State school officials say they hope the nearly $2 million project will be the first step in a plan to wire schools for technology and provide teachers with the training and tools to deliver interactive lessons.
“The revolution starts now. This is the cutting edge,” Kurtis said. “It’s a whole new system of problem-based learning that makes the lesson more relevant for students, makes it easier to connect with the real world.”
With a curriculum created by teams of educators and Kurtis’ Schaumburg-based Electronic Long Distance Learning Network, or Eld!n, 5th- through 8th-grade students examined the effects of a major earthquake originating from the New Madrid fault zone, which stretches from Missouri to Arkansas.
For several weeks, students performed hands-on experiments and analyzed data centering on four themes: the composition of the Earth, the quake’s disruption of agriculture, disease epidemics and the monitoring of the planet from space.
Teachers taught primarily with computer CDs, videos from Kurtis’ series “The New Explorers,” and a Web page designed by Eld!n. Each participating school received a new computer, and teachers could use e-mail and chat rooms to communicate with each other and experts in the field.
Pat Franzen, an 8th-grade teacher at Madison Junior High School in Naperville’s District 203 sat on a panel during Monday’s interactive show along with students who had come up with a contingency plan in case an earthquake hit along the New Madrid fault zone.
“This gave us teachers a whole new perspective,” she said. “The students are getting right into it, getting wet and dirty with a real-world problem.”
In Rolling Meadows, District 15’s Willow Bend Elementary School’s 5th- and 6th-grade classes studied the “Killer Virus” unit. Teachers had some trouble integrating the new project with the school’s interdisciplinary structure, said Willow Bend media specialist Jan Belzer.
“We don’t have just a science class or just a math class,” Belzer said. “But we were fortunate that now our thematic is animals, and we found out the Hunta virus is caused by field mice.”
Parent participation was built into the curriculum, with an especially useful homework assignment arising in the virus unit.
“Kids had an exercise to create a medical history of their family with their parents, so they would know what diseases are prevalent,” said Eld!n president Tom Rivera.
Rivera admitted the project needs refinements before it is launched again in the spring, with double the number of schools.
“The largest, toughest component of this has been teacher training,” he said. “This has never been done, and there aren’t any books for the kids.”
Whatever rough edges the project has, the interactive show went smoothly, and the state has already asked Eld!n to invent a reading-based curriculum that meets the new state curriculum standards, said Richard Capriola, assistant to state School Supt. Joseph Spagnolo. They will ask the state for another $2 million in next year’s budget to continue funding the project.
In the coming months, Eld!n and the state will assess the project.
If their findings match the opinion of Dominique Palmer, 13, from Hayt Elementary School in Chicago, it will be considered a success.
“This is a better way to learn for kids,” she said. “It gets us more involved.”
