The Electronic Field Trip: A New Way To Learn Live from Antarctica is an electronic field trip in the most literal sense. While other distance-learning projects use this term to describe video conferences linking students with experts in remote locations such as television studios or zoos, this project links students directly with working researchers in the field. In "real" field trips, students leave their regular classrooms and are shown sights that they might otherwise not experience. Live from Antarctica-as a first installment of the ongoing Passport to Knowledge series-does the same. However, no yellow school buses are required. Instead, by means of an innovative, integrated suite of educational tools, students are "virtually" transported to research sites and other locations otherwise too distant, too difficult, or too dangerous to reach. As in the best conventional field trips, students visit experts on their home turf, and the experts answer questions by referring to what the students see and experience.

Project Components: The Three T's Live from Antarctica utilizes the power of the three T's-- Television, Telecommunications, and the Teacher to enable students to be active participants in some of the most exciting scientific research currently underway.

1. The four live Television broadcasts from Antarctica are key components, but ideally for you and your students, the project should not begin and end with them. The project is designed, as the following sections make clear, to include both preparatory activities, so that students know what to look out for, and follow-up activities, so that students can build on their "virtual" field experiences.
2. Telecommunications provides the opportunity for some students at selected sites to talk with field researchers on "the Ice," live and on camera. We hope other students will be inspired by such interactions over distances that would have been unimaginable even 10 years ago. However, uplink sites equipped to permit such live interactions are necessarily limited. Our Telecommunications component allows many more students to ask these researchers as many questions, via e-mail, as their classroom protocols or phone bills will allow!
3. This Teacher's Guide is a tool for you, the Teacher. It provides hands- on, discovery-based activities for middle school grades, with suggestions for adapting them to lower or higher grades. The Teacher's Guide addresses how Live from Antarctica might fit with existing curricula in many states and how it can bring to life many ideas embodied in forthcoming national science standards.

The Teacher's Guide includes information on how to get on-line by means of computer networks such as PBS ONLINE's Learning Link and NASA's Spacelink and how to connect with NASA's K-12 Internet Project. NASA's Internet Project has put in place a system of "smart filters" for routing questions to the relevant experts in Antarctica (or to Antarctic experts back here in the United States) so that all questions will be answered. Students with simple inquiries (for example, "How many kinds of penguins live in the Antarctic?") will be guided to an on-line interactive database that they can search for an answer using key words.

This kind of interaction represents only one facet of the on-line participation provided by this project. Live from Antarctica will showcase several remote sensing databases, and the project will be supported by MOSAIC Home Pages at multiple NASA field centers and at the National Science Foundation. An on-line guide will provide more instructions on how to access such electronic resources and how to use the information found there in the classroom. Classes with experience in on-line communication may wish to collaborate with one another by computer networking to share scientific observations or to write up and publish their responses to the project.

The Teacher's Guide Format: The Four E's

The four E's--Engage, Explore, Explain, and Expand--represent a format for structuring science education materials applied by Prentice Hall School, a leading educational publisher of more than 100 programs for all the major subject areas in grades 6-12.The Live from Antarctica team found this format compatible with its own approach to science learning. Thus, we are incorporating this framework. Prentice Hall is supporting Live from Antarctica as an innovative, multimedia education project and is publishing this free Teacher's Guide.

Each activity in Live from Antarctica is structured to:

• Engage: Capture students' interest in science by preparing them to experience the videos, by having them keep journals about the project, or by encouraging them to use the suite of available learning tools.
• Explore: Help students construct ideas from first-hand observation and experience, using hands-on activities.
• Explain: Facilitate student learning with specific content and teaching strategies, incorporated in the Teacher's Guide and in on-line materials.
• Expand: Review and reinforce concepts, and reteach by tapping visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic, and other learning modes. Several activities lend themselves to a form of embedded assessment: for example, redesigning the South Pole station requires an understanding of climate and weather, waste recycling, and energy requirements.Just as each activity embodies the four E's, so does the project as a whole. Preparing to watch the videos, particularly the first-ever live TV link with the South Pole, will surely Engage your students. Hands-on activities suggested in the Teacher's Guide will allow your students to Explore underlying concepts in science. Background information in this Guide or on-line will allow you to Explain. Your own experience coupled with resources provided by this project will allow you to Expand on what students learn through this project, letting them apply their new knowledge to the real world.

Why make time for Live from Antarctica?

Teachers' Perspective by Pat Haddon (6th grade science teacher) and April Lloyd (3rd grade teacher and technology specialist)

Teaching science is tremendously exciting because there is always one more great activity to investigate with kids, one more "wow" look at that response to nurture and encourage. And there are always more questions asked than answered. How then can a teacher take 2/3 weeks out of an already crammed teaching/learning schedule to participate in an Electronic Field Trip?

Effective science teachers, whether in a high school lab or third grade classroom, foster an environment where students can simulate real-world scientific endeavors. Through these, we try to make students scientifically literate and able to think about things using the methods and habits of science.

Students need lots of experiences that allow them to think of problems and generate possible hypotheses that they can investigate and test. They need to see that simulations in their classrooms actually do reflect the work of professional scientists. They need to be aware of current scientific research and up-to-date technologies. Even the most dedicated science teachers find "keeping current" a formidable task. And textbooks, no matter how new, cannot keep up with changing trends in research and technology and the resulting information explosion.

Students also need to see scientists not as white-coated automatons confined to sterile laboratories, but as real people who work in factories and on farms, in hospitals, offices, universities, and in industry. They need to see scientists--whether out in space or on the ocean floor--who are excited by their work and who are not daunted by the daily challenges of field research. How do we add this dimension to our classroom settings? We take the time to join researchers in the field via telecommunications. Live from Antarctica allows students and teachers to connect to the largest scientific laboratory on Earth, a full continent across. Students will be able to talk with working scientists, observing them as they address problems in one of the most demanding environments on our planet. Students will conduct investigations and take part in activities that answer questions (and generate even more questions) about our past and our future, encouraging them to think about the social, political, and environmental aspects of scientific investigation. And, like the very best field trip, an electronic excursion to this rare and exotic setting will surely fascinate, inspire, and motivate. This makes learning fun and exciting. How can you not want to come along too?

Support for Live from Antarctica comes, in part, from the Information Infrastructure Technology and Applications Program of NASA's Office of High Performance Computing and Communications. Our integrated, multimedia project coincided with NASA's intent to promote greater use of the vast, but hitherto, under-utilized volumes of earth and space science data. We hope you and your students will mine the riches that await you, just an on-line connection away!