Lights, Camera, Webcast!

It has been an interesting week here at Kennedy Space Center. For the past three months, Space Team Online has worked with the Learning Technologies Channel to produce a series of web casts that allow students to "log on" to the exciting events at the Space Center. What is a web cast? It is an event that is distributed to your computer using RealMedia© technology.

The web casts from Kennedy have one more very important feature in that they are interactive. This means that, as you view the event, you can also ask questions using a chatroom. The presenter will answer your questions live as you view it in your browser!

Our most recent web cast featured Michael Ciannilli who took us on a tour of the Vehicle Assembly Building with Linda Conrad, the Space Team Online project manager. Some of our previous events included a tour of the Space Station Processing Facility (SSPF) to view actual components of the International Space Station and to interact with Joe Delai and Sharon Carlson. Joe and Sharon are engineers who work at Kennedy and are excited to inform you of the progress of the ISS. Mike, Joe, and Sharon hosted a web cast together that gave a great overview of the purpose of the International Space Station and the assembly process that is involved.

Some of our future web casts will involve Space Shuttle launches, facility tours such as the launch pads and the Orbiter Processing Facilities, and a variety of other space related topics. We encourage all of you to join us in this series. To find out how to prepare your computer to use the real media technology, please visit the Learning Technologies Channel at http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/ltc/sto/iss/index.html. If you have a particular event that you would be interested in, please e-mail me at brandt@palmnet.net.

A lot of coordination takes place for the production of a web cast. It is always a team effort and even though it is hectic, it is a lot of fun. Our LTC project manager, Kate Weisberg, oversees the production and gives us advice on how to best present the event. The Space Team Online project manager usually develops the content and the technical issues are left up to me at Kennedy Space Center. We are very fortunate to have many Engineers at Kennedy Space Center that are willing to take their time and share their expertise with us. So, to all of them, I say "THANKS!" To all of you I say, "Come and join us, and let us know how we can best serve YOUR interests!"