The Eagle's Nest

Last Wednes­day morn­ing ten teach­ers from dif­fer­ent sub­ject ar­eas at the high school met for the first train­ing ses­sion in the high school’s new dis­tance learn­ing lab. Prepa­ra­tions for this day be­gan in Oc­to­ber of 2007 af­ter Rhea County re­ceived a grant for $496,212. This grant, know as The Rural De­vel­op­ment Dis­tance Learn­ing and Telemed­i­cine (DLT) grant, is de­signed to pro­vide rural com­mu­ni­ties with tech­nol­ogy that will help im­prove ac­cess to ed­u­ca­tional and med­ical services.

The train­ing ses­sion demon­strated to the teach­ers the po­ten­tial of this project. With the use of spe­cial­ized dis­tance learn­ing equip­ment con­sist­ing of a cam­era and sen­si­tive mi­cro­phones at­tached to a 50-​​inch plasma screen TV, classes at RCHS can  con­nect to re­mote pre­sen­ters from around the world over the Internet.

In the ses­sion, for in­stance, the teach­ers con­nected with a pair of in­struc­tors from the Kennedy Space Cen­ter in Florida. The teach­ers were able to see and com­mu­ni­cate with the NASA in­struc­tors in real-​​time, and watch in­for­ma­tional slides, video of shut­tle launch, and even a live demon­stra­tion of liq­uid ni­tro­gen. They also spoke with Karin Davidson-​​Taylor, an in­struc­tor from the Royal Botan­i­cal Gar­dens in On­tario, Canada, who showed them the pos­si­bil­i­ties of “vir­tual field trips” to the Gar­dens that tie in with many dif­fer­ent types of curriculum.

The dis­tance learn­ing lab gives stu­dents of all  Rhea County schools the abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate with ex­perts, go on vir­tual field trips, and watch labs that would have been im­pos­si­ble to at­tend in the past. Mrs. Guf­fey said she would like to use the project to help el­e­men­tary and mid­dle school stu­dents un­der­stand test ma­te­r­ial bet­ter. Mr. Far­ney said would like to use dis­tance learn­ing labs to have stu­dents make les­son plans that could be taught the other Rhea schools.

This pro­gram would also would fill in holes our cur­rent cur­ricu­lum and al­low stu­dents to take classes such as Dual En­roll­ment Cal­cu­lus or French, for ex­am­ple, which are not of­fered at the high school. Many other classes could be of­fered by a net­work of part­ner­ships in­clud­ing Bryan Col­lege, Chat­tanooga State, Van­der­bilt Uni­ver­sity and East Ten­nessee State Uni­ver­sity. Mr. Le­v­en­good said that he would like to see the pro­gram phased into the cur­ricu­lum by next school year. Ad­min­is­tra­tion will be dis­cussing all of the de­tails dur­ing the summer.