Just got a new site up today!  I’ve been in love with this project the moment I heard about it.  I mentioned it in brief a couple weeks ago, but things are up and rolling now. 

The site is DiscoveryEducatorAbroad.com.  There’s a Travel Channel show called 5 Takes: Pacific Rim and we got permission to send a teacher along with them.  The teachers name is Josh Wolff and he has his own weblog where he has worked to bring travel experiences to students that would normally never get the chance to go to remote locations.

He’s going to be blogging, video blogging, and doing a few live video conferences from the field.  Basically, he’s trying to bring nearly every aspect of his trip to students around the country (and world) through technology.

I bet you’re wondering what technology we’re using to bring this experience to schools.  Probably really high tech stuff that schools could never dream of doing, right?  Wrong.  This entire project is being done in a way that could easily be replicated by other schools.

The bulk of the website is being handled by Drupal, thanks in no small part to the advice of Wesley Fryer.  Blogs are being handled by Drupal as well.  Photos are being brought into the site using Flickr, and Feedburner is massaging the feed to incoroprate the photos as well as provide enclosures for the webisodes allowing people to subscribe to them as vlogs or vidcasts. 

Simple, eh?  What I love about it is that this is a model that schools could replicate when their own students go on remove field trips, such as the class trip to Washington and such. 

The project itself is incredibly exciting to me because teachers and students can really INTERACT with Josh as he travels.  They can vote for where they want him to go and request that he research things in the message boards.  Then he’ll do the research and bring the information back in blog form or devote a webisode to it.  How cool is that?

Somebody already requested that Josh check out Zorbing while he’s in New Zealand.  And it looks like he’s going to!  It’s sort of like virtual project based learning.  Using technology to bring these experiences to students who might normally never get the opportunity to ask questions along these lines and actually have them answered personally.

He’ll be spending 12 weeks journeying along with the Travel Channel, and heading to Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore and other locations in the Pacific Rim.  He’ll be in the field through the end of the school year, so there are plenty of opportunities to interact with him.

I think it’s an incredibly cool project.  So if you have any ideas for him, visit DiscoveryEducatorAbroad.com and share them!

• Discovery Education, meet the Travel Channel.
• Why blog?
• Podcasting and Videocasting galore
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• A modern version of X marks the spot

Jeff Utecht
3/20/2006

What a great project! I’ll make sure to pass it on to my teachers.

What if schools replicated this sort of project only within their city or state? Where they went ‘on location’ with some of the famous and historical areas around their home and school. Students could create videos and upload them to a central location creating an Education Abroad like web site with webisodes from all around the country. Studying westward expansion? Contact a school in St. Louis to do a webisode on the Oregon trail, then contact a school in Portland, Oregon to do a webisode at the end of the trail. If DEN could provide the web space to collect and manage the videos think of the learning and interaction between students, schools, communities, etc.

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