Distance learning
By Brandy Nance (Contact)
Originally published 01:54 p.m., March 4, 2008
Updated 01:54 p.m., March 4, 2008
Photo by Carly Pearson
Four television screens are hooked up in the IDL lab that show the teacher instructing the students from another location and show the what the students look like to the teacher.
ALLEN
What’s the matter?
Amanda Newman’s Admire third-grade class spent a portion of Thursday afternoon at Northern Heights High School learning “what’s the matter” with their day.
And it’s not the “matter” students originally thought. Newman’s students learned through Northern Heights’ Internet Distance Learning (IDL) lab what different forms of matter were around them — solids, gases and liquids.
Northern Heights has had its IDL lab in place around 13 years, said principal Doug Boline. The lab allows students to hook into classrooms from anywhere via an Internet connection, several monitors at the front of the room and microphones on the tables. Boline said staff also uses the lab for inservices and committee meetings. The lab can be used for virtually anything a camera can be hooked into. One year, students had the opportunity to talk to Kansas Supreme Court judges, Boline said.
But for Newman’s class, it was all about matter. Students listened to Sharon Wilson, of the Greenbush Southeast Kansas Education Service Center. Greenbush Southeast Kansas Education was formed in 1976 in the small, un-incorporated town of Greenbush, in Crawford County.
Newman said her students just completed a unit on solids and the Internet lab gave them some extra practice.
“For us, this would be a follow-up,” Newman said. “They love this type of interaction.”
And the students’ reactions to the lab said it all — they did enjoy it. The students were provided with materials to use during the lab. Among the items in front of them were tubing, flasks, plastic Zip-Lock bags and antacid tablets. The lab taught students the properties of solids, liquids and gases.
Photo by Carly Pearson
Third-grade teacher Amanda Newman gives instructions to her class before they start a lab in the IDL lab at Northern Heights High School.
The students were asked to write down three words to describe the various things in front of them. For solids they were asked to pick up an object. They were asked to write down three words to describe that object. Then Wilson asked the students what the properties of a solid object are — it takes up space, keeps its shape, has weight and you can see it.
Next came water. Students wrote down words to describe water. Then they went through the properties of liquid — you can see it and it has weight. However, unlike solids, liquid does not keep its shape.
Lastly, Wilson talked the students through gases. Students were asked to blow into a plastic bag and zip it up. Inside they were left with air — a gas. Students learned that air takes up space, it can’t be seen and it does have weight even though it’s light.
To learn more about how gases work, students were paired up. They used two flasks, a black stopper, plastic tubing and a glass straw. They were asked to hook the two flasks, which had water inside of them, together with tubing. Silence fell across the room as students concentrated on hooking tubing between the two. Silence turned into giggles and squeals of delight as they were asked to put an antacid tablet into one of the flasks. The result was not what they expected. The gas from the first flask went through the tubing and made the water in the other flask bubble.
Photo by Carly Pearson
Admire School third-graders Rebekah Cain, left, and Haily Gaddis work on a lab about matter in the internet distance learning lab at Northern Heights High School on Thursday afternoon.
“Mine is going crazy!” one student exclaimed.
“It sounds cool!” another student called out as the sounds of bubbling water filled the room.
At the end of the lab, students again were asked “What’s the matter?”
This time, they knew the answer — all around them was solid matter, gas matter and liquid matter.
For more information on Greenbush Southeast Kansas Education Service Center go to http://www.greenbush.org/.
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