"Virtual instruction" is set to become a regular part of learning this fall in a Baltimore County school.
The school district has teamed up with universities, defense contractors and a video game developer for help with a high-tech program designed to breathe life into textbook lessons and challenge students with the kind of problem-solving that employers might expect.
"We wanted students to have an experience that would be more typical of what they'd have, hands-on, in the real world," said Maria Lowry, principal of Chesapeake High School, which is to pilot a new virtual classroom. "We're trying to bring the outside in."
The initiative, for which nearly $1 million is requested in the next fiscal year, is part of the school system's effort to equip students with 21st-century skills. Teachers can use simulations of real-life situations and problems to help students apply what they learn. The planned classroom of computer work stations and a wall of large screens for group lessons is believed to be a first in the area.
School officials recently got a preview at the Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Laboratory. In a dark room illuminated by five 70-inch screens, they went on a ride - alternately in an ATV-like vehicle, a boat and an aircraft - through the sprawling simulated landscape of Mount St. Helens in Washington, as part of a rescue expedition.
Students doing the program would stumble upon questions and clues requiring knowledge in botany, meteorology and math, said David Peloff, program director for emerging technologies at Hopkins' Center for Technology in Education.
Under a federal grant and with the laboratory, the center developed the learning adventure, which Deep Creek Middle, a Chesapeake feeder school, is to try this spring.
"Using 3-D simulation technologies that are common in more technical fields, and bringing those technologies to kids, we just think that will provide them so many new opportunities to learn things in ways that professionals are learning them," Peloff said.
Several area districts employ some virtual instruction in their classrooms. Students in Anne Arundel County use sites that simulate experiments and present animations of scientific phenomena, said Rochelle Slutskin, coordinator of science. The districtwide program is in its second year, she said.
