Electronic field trips bring live TV’s thrill to school

Originally published in Current, June 2, 1997
By Geneva Collins

Few phrases conjure up near-hysteria in schoolchildren as effectively as "field trip!" These real-world excursions mean escape from textbooks, a break from routine, the thrill of unpredictable lunches and bumpity bus rides, and the drama of irregular bathroom breaks. Oh yeah, there's educational stuff, too.

Enter the electronic field trip, an often daring feat of technowizardry that attempts to make good on educational TV's old promise to bring the world to the classroom. In the last few years, public TV has served up experts in exotic locales (ice-bound Antarctica, Colonial Williamsburg, a Costa Rican rain forest, a British bird sanctuary, a Kentucky thoroughbred farm) to interact live with students, fielding their questions amid hisses and blackouts and missed audio cues. These real-time satellite transmissions are beefed up with pre-recorded segments and supported by extensive Internet resources and printed teaching guides for use before and after the staged event.

It's been four years since PBS beamed its first high-profile electronic field trip, Live From Other Worlds, a 1993 pilot that showed students in Hawaii and Virginia using remote controls to maneuver underwater robots deep beneath the Antarctic. It was, to borrow the slogan the producer uses today, "real science, real scientists, real locations, real time."

PBS alone transmits three or four series of field-trips a year, each composed of several live broadcasts and attracting audiences that producers guess are seen by 1 million or more students.

The question is, do they really work? Is the live, interactive experience worth the expense and the headaches? Are teachers using them in the classroom?

The short answer is, well, they face a lot of obstacles--and most of them have nothing to do with the complex technical machinations required on the production end.

"When we were [in Antarctica] transmitting from an icebreaker and a gust of wind blew the microwave dish off the deck, we lost the signal," said Geoffrey Haines-Stiles, project director for Passport to Knowledge, an independent producer of virtual outings. "Was that a problem? No. The kids thought it was really exciting. Seeing water on the camera lens made it real for them. They knew anything could happen."

If a school bus is the working metaphor for the genre, Passport to Knowledge is perhaps the Rolls-Royce of the electronic field trips distributed by PBS. With funding from the National Science Foundation and NASA, Haines-Stiles has orchestrated two separate visits to Antarctica, gone inside NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center so students can tell the Hubble Space Telescope what to look at, and gotten two high school kids aboard a Lockheed jet outfitted as a flying observatory.

Since April, his five-part expedition Live From Mars has followed the journey of NASA's Pathfinder and Sojourner unmanned spacecraft to the red planet.

Museum hopping, cave crawling

On the other end of the scale are much more modest excursions by state networks like Maryland PTV and Kentucky ETV, designed to serve regional needs.

MPT, although it was a co-producer of Passport to Knowledge's Live from Antarctica field trip in 1995, has more recently focused on small-scale projects. On May 22, for example, it took students via satellite to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to show off a Picasso exhibit.

Although the gallery is less exotic than the South Pole, "there's something about live TV, knowing that you can ask a question right now to the person who restored the Picasso painting, that changes the way children become engaged in the subject matter," said Gail Porter Long, v.p. of education and telecommunications for MPT.

"Live is OK, we can push it all we want, but it's not as realistic as we like to believe it is," said Liz Hobson, director of education for KET, whose crews have swarmed down a coal mine and toured the offices of the Lexington Herald-Leader, among other venues. And her evaluations show, as do most other producers', that more than 60 percent of teachers tape her field trips and show them later.

One of KET's most popular jaunts, a visit to Mammoth Cave National Park, Ky., was, in fact, not live at all. It was meant to be, but dire weather predictions made the crew fear the heavy satellite uplink truck couldn't make it down the steep roads to the cave.

"We taped it in advance and just pretended it was live," said Hobson.

"For us at KET, we have stopped showing off the technology and are concentrating on the idea of re-creating the field trip experience, but with more," she said."When we went to Mammoth Cave, our cameraman took the 'wild cave tour,' where you have to crawl through some parts on your stomach. It's a three-hour tour only the most physically fit get to do. Thirty kids in a class wouldn't get to do that."

"One of the evolutions in the thinking of electronic field trips is that the interactivity doesn't have to occur in the live broadcast," said Sandy Welch, executive v.p. for PBS Learning Services. "Where the real rich interactivity takes place is online--before, during and after the broadcast. We keep up the web sites up for months."

Competing for attention

Perhaps the hardest part of pulling off an electronic field trip--after you find your underwriters--is letting teachers know you exist.

Electronic field trips aren't competing with real field trips--who could send a class to watch flamingos in Kenya, as Turner Learning Adventure did? They're not even competing with other electronic outings.

The real competition is "all the new software, CD-ROMs, videos, the Internet, and so on, that are also fighting for teachers' attention," said Ed Menaker, project manager for The New Explorers and executive producer for The Chicago Production Center, WTTW. The New Explorers, with host Bill Kurtis, and WTTW have produced several electronic field trips, the latest on endangered species.

"It's very costly to market these nationally," said Welch. "There's 100,000 schools in this country. Direct marketing is quite expensive. You have to have multiple hits to get teachers' attention. You're struggling over whether to send your information to the librarian, the principal, or the individual teacher. You have to set up an 800 number and provide customer service for the number. You have to provide technical support to tell the schools how to get the show off the satellite or other means of getting it."

Field trip producers who've spent serious money to get the word out cringe at stories like Nancy Perry's. A fifth grade teacher at Louisa Elementary in tiny Louisa, Ky., she taped a PBS-distributed Colonial Williamsburg field trip in March after stumbling upon it by accident. She had no idea "Backdraft: The Fire Engine in the Colonial Community" was part of a CPB-funded series now in its second year. She also stumbled upon a Live From Mars event--but not in time to tape it. "I thought it was wonderful. But I can't spend all my time watching the TV for these things."

Perry's class has enjoyed several KET trips, but they're easier for her to find out about--her daughter works for the network.

Another problem with getting the field trips in the classroom is that "a lot of teachers must march in lock step with the administration to cover certain core curriculum. Sometimes teachers need to apply for special grants to deviate from the curriculum,"said WTTW's Menaker.

"For teachers to incorporate the field trips in the curriculum [for the following school year] they need to know about them in March, April. We haven't been able to announce them until June, July, August. That's been our biggest problem," said John Richards, senior v.p. and general manager for Turner Learning. Turner has produced more than a dozen glitzy electronic field trips, to places like Berlin, for the 50th anniversary of V-E Day, and inside a high-security biolab at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

"This combination of media--written, data, video, Internet, live TV all in combination--is very cutting edge. It's hard for teachers to know how to use it and bring it into the curriculum," said Richards.

Trips with prime time tie-in

Turner distributed its field trips via PBS until the 1996-97 school year, when executives there decided to distribute them via Turner's own networks, which include TBS, TNT and CNN.

"Because many of the field trips were being produced in conjunction with network projects, it made sense to distribute them that way," said Richards. Turner Learning Adventure's tour of the CDC was produced in conjunction with The Coming Plague, a four-hour documentary that aired on TBS, for example. And growing numbers of classrooms have access to cable. (Nearly three-quarters of schools have cable, according to Cable in the Classroom; the number of classrooms served is smaller.) This technique of combining electronic field trips with prime time projects has been used by the The New Explorers and PBS for Wild Wings: Heading South, underwritten by the National Audubon Society. Many of the field trips are also reversioned in shorter segments for traditional ITV use.

It's a way of maximizing production crews and getting more mileage out of this expensive footage. It costs $1 million to 1.5 million (counting direct and indirect costs) to launch one of Passport to Knowledge's technology-heavy productions. Turner's field trips can cost up to a $500,000. A typical KET excursion is $15,000 to $20,000.

Although some of these electronic field trips are free to schools, other producers charge $100 or more for teaching kits, toll-free numbers, special web-site passwords, and taping rights. Turner halved its charge to $150 this year from last year.

All this money and effort is aimed at productions for classrooms sometimes overwhelmed by the nascent technology.

Classes like Nancy Perry's in rural Eastern Kentucky won't have an Internet hookup for their computer until next year. If her students want to ask a question during an electronic field trip, she turns it into a pen-and-paper writing exercise.

Welch at PBS couldn't say whether more students watch the shows via satellite or by broadcast from a local PBS station, because carriage varies so much from field trip to field trip and school districts' needs vary around the country. Some states, like Georgia and Kentucky, have satellite dishes on virtually every school. Some districts have their own cable channel for broadcasting educational programming.

In March, fifth-grade teacher Peter Rose at Thomas Jefferson Elementary in Falls Church, Va., spent days preparing to receive "Backdraft" in his classroom. The school has a satellite dish, but it was mishandled during recent renovation and wasn't working. He had contacted nearby George Mason University about retransmitting the program, which required that the school's engineers snake a cable from one building to another.

Now, on the day of broadcast, while excited students pushed their desks aside and arranged their chairs auditorium style around a TV emblazoned with a test pattern, he was trying to figure out how students could phone in questions. He had borrowed a cordless phone from the office, but it could only be used by standing out in the hallway. Any child wanting to call in a question would miss seeing the program.

Rose sighed. "One technology at a time, please."

Web page posted May 30, 1997
Current: the newspaper about public TV and radio
in the United States
Copyright 1997 Current Publishing Committee,
Takoma Park, Md.