Designing a snowboard, managing a ski resort's snow, maintaining ice quality at a skating rink: they may not be your usual grammar school pursuits, but thanks to PBS, thousands of students across the country will soon be tackling these tasks virtually. The US Olympic PBS Cyber School, launching 6 February, is tapping student passion for action sports to create online lesson plans. The result, its creators hope, will be increased interest in online learning from both kids and their teachers.
"We've got wiring in schools, but now what? The wires are dangling down the wall, but what do we do with them?" asks Michael Kaufman, PBS director of digital learning and a NetDay founder. "The Web is here, digital technology is here to stay, and it's going to be in the classroom. So now we need to build the kinds of tools and materials that students can use."
The multi-million dollar project, which will be advertised in 15-second spots on CBS during the Olympic games, is expected to draw upwards of 4 million pageviews a day. Students in participating schools will be able to choose from 90 "challenges," in beginning, intermediate, or advanced levels, under the category of skiing, snowboarding, or ice skating. Challenges will be based on math, science, and social studies, veiled, however, in more exciting, Olympian forms: Aerodynamic will be explained through snowboard clothing, physics through the skating of a figure 8.
"You're looking at skiing, snowboarding, and skating, you're not looking at math, science, and social studies," says Kaufman. "It's 'sneaky learning' or 'guerilla teaching.'"
Each challenge will require Web research, and project building, drawing, or writing over a period of several days. Completed challenges will be submitted as a Web page, built using an online template created by site sponsor IBM; 15 randomly selected sites will be able to compete for a gold medal for that challenge each day. At the end of the Olympics, randomly chosen gold medal winners will receive cash prizes.
Cyber School is not the only online scholastic project: From Scholastic to Simon and Schuster, Classroom Connect to the Jason Project, countless educational undertakings have sprung up in the last few years to try to take advantage of the Net's potential for learning. The projects have garnered both criticism (for appealing primarily to wealthier schools with technology access and know-how) and praise (for revitalizing student learning and opening a window into the world).
This is, however, PBS's first attempt at an online-only educational package. Although PBS's main Web site, PBS.org, is popular for its educational content based on its television shows, the Cyber School is the first attempt at creating Web-specific educational programming; if it succeeds, PBS will continue with different topics, curricula, and contributing teachers.
Those contributing teachers, asserts Kaufman, are one unique aspect of the project: 40 teachers around the country created the site's content without ever meeting each other face to face. In conjunction with New York PBS affiliate WNET's National Teacher Training Initiative (which teaches educators how to use technology in the classroom), teachers around the country were taught how to build an online curriculum via online tutorials, before each built two challenges for the site.
One of those teachers is Al Doyle, the technology coordinator for Poly Prep school in Brooklyn and a NTTI participant. Besides training other teachers in online curriculum building, he's volunteered his class to organize the News area of the Cyber School, where students will report on the daily events occuring at the Olympics in Nagano, Japan. His students have already started working on a few of the challenges ("Build a Snowboard" was by far the most popular challenge, Doyle says) and the enthusiasm has been high.
"Students are more motivated when they know their work has the possibility of being published," Doyle says. Since his school got online a year ago, Doyle has seen his students' engagement with projects grow.
He elaborates, "This is the medium of this generation - it speaks to them. It may be no better than a textbook, but by doing it on the Web you can reach a new cadre of students who would otherwise be turned off. It's the sheer interactivity."
