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The ITTIP operates a two-way videoconferencing network that uses the H.323 protocol, which is becoming the international standard. "We're using the Internet to communicate through video real-time," says Inge. "Our network is housed at Halifax County High School and serves all 22 school divisions. We're sharing teachers who might have specific content knowledge we can't get around here. We're providing staff development and training for teachers. Videoconferencing is used to collaborate student-to-student, to share professional development opportunities, and to bring in experts."

In early February the ITTIP and the SVRTC launched the JASON Project in Virginia, an international education effort dedicated to "inspiring in students a lifelong passion to pursue learning in science, math, and technology through exploration and discovery."

Sponsored by the JASON Foundation for Education, which is funded largely by NASA, the JASON Project links sites all over the United States. The SVRTC and Bill Wilson, the ITTIP's senior technology engineer, linked eight sites in Virginia, one of which is the Science Museum of Virginia, to the global network.

"We linked remote sites using Internet 2 (I2), the next generation Internet backbone developed for research and broadband applications," Inge says. "I viewed students at the Science Museum of Virginia participate in this by discussing physics, science and engineering concepts with students and experts in marine biology and oceanography, real-time, over I2 and using H.323 videoconferencing for the broadcast. This project and its delivery model is one of the first ever in the country using K-12 students and I2."

Through the network, Randolph-Henry High School in Charlotte County and Prince Edward County High School have offered classes to each other - criminal justice by the former, Latin by the latter. Greensville County and Halifax County high schools have received courses from Southside Virginia Community College, and Danville schools have delivered classes to Halifax. The network also enabled a judge in Charlotte County to have a videoconference with a judge in Texas regarding a custody hearing, says Bill Wilson.

"We just signed an agreement with the NASA Distance Education Center in which we will be delivering NASA content through our videoconferencing network," Inge says. "This will include NASA science experts and pre-packaged programming from the Center, which is in Hampton Roads. Topics could include earth patterns, cycles and change, the interrelationship in earth/space systems, principles of electricity and magnetism, the nature of matter, and planning and conducting investigations. They want a strategic partnership not only with the ITTIP but also with Longwood's pre-service teacher program."

Other projects are more down-to-earth. The Institute is managing a family literacy program through a $250,000 grant it recently helped obtain. "We're working with the Halifax County school system, which is the fiscal agent, at two sites, the Southern Virginia Higher Education Center and the Halifax County Career Center," says Charla Crews of the ITTIP staff, who is project coordinator. "It targets low-literacy adults, teen parents, and speakers of English as a second language. We hope to improve the adults' technology literacy, which helps prepare them for the workforce. We're using software programs that increase reading skills. We're also working with each child's classroom teacher; the teacher can come in here and work. Sometimes the parent and the child work together on an SOL-related activity, and sometimes they work separately. Some of the adults are pursuing their GED. The grant is renewable for up to five years."

The ITTIP headquarters resembles a cross between a sleek corporate office and a high-tech science lab, with its array of touch screens, large plasma and flat screen monitors, videoconferencing units, electronic miniature computers, and servers.

One nifty piece of equipment is the plasma screen in Inge's office. It has touch-screen capabilities - you can write on it with your finger - and is hooked up to a laptop on a small table just below the screen. Wilson used a nearby camera to zoom in on his wedding band, which appeared in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, then did likewise on a live shot of the ITTIP office in Blackstone.

"I can go anywhere in the world with this, as long as you have an H.323 system," says Inge. "I can see them, and they can see me. I can operate on a heart, if I have the enhanced equipment that accompanies this type of technology. I have done many employee interviews with this technology and have used it to host meetings."

Interjected Wilson: "You can do anything on this that you can on a computer. You can move the cursor on the smaller screen by touching the larger screen. It's used in the corporate world and in higher education. A higher bandwidth version is used frequently in telemedicine. This is a $400 or $500 system; in telemedicine they use systems that begin at $30,000."

Inge is excited about the "mobile distance education studio" the staff designed and built as a distance education prototype. It features a "brick" for audio feeds (which looks like a gas grill with two side panels), a mixer on top of that for audio input and mixing, a wireless microphone, a teleprompter that fits over the camera, and a lighting system.

"We've developed two systems so far; both are for the SVRTC and one is here. The Virginia Department of Education wants us to build two studios, we'll also build one for the Virginia National Guard, and there is a proposal to do one for Longwood's College of Education and Human Services. This system can be used for training, for demonstrations. The next generation distance education studio will have a tablet PC running the software, Microsoft's Producer, that builds the distance education modules. We'll most likely spin it off into private industry to help the Governor reach his vision for Virginia's economy outlined in his Commonwealth of Virginia 2002-2006 Strategic Plan for Technology, announced in September; specifically, his desire to commercialize intellectual property from colleges, universities and research centers."

The tablet PC Inge was examining, made by Compaq, is impressive. When she typed in the word "Genes," up popped a distance education module developed by her staff that contained a presentation on Down's Syndrome. It's part of the library of more than 14,000 video clips, mostly two to three minutes long, from a company called United Streaming, which was used for the study. "You can make notes, you can hit pause, play or fast-forward," she says. "I can stop it and start it, the teacher within the module can talk to the video, and the video will correspond to each slide developed by the teacher. It's a type of TV-on-demand, as we call it. It requires broadband Internet access; all 22 school divisions have that and can do streaming video, which is what the study was about. We were chosen for the study because of our regional topology developed in part by Bill (Wilson) with SVRTC; video streaming can be bandwidth-intensive."

Inge also used the tablet PC to play lessons by two Longwood students preparing to be teachers, one of which featured a Power Point presentation involving streaming video. One lesson was about prefixes and suffixes; the other about preventing childhood aggression. "Both were done from this building, and both were done for a class I taught last summer," she says.

The ITTIP has distributed automated microscopes, telescopes and handheld technology to schools throughout the region. "One way we're closing the digital divide is through our technology lending program," Inge says.

"We require training on the part of the schools and for them to become mentors following training. This was an early strategy of ours, as a way of getting started, but we're getting away from it. At first we did a lot of direct outreach. Now we're doing more research and development on top of the outreach."

Also in its early days, the Institute conducted training for teachers and school administrators to become more computer-savvy. In the fall of 2000, in conjunction with the SVRTC, it trained 240 K-12 school administrators. "The training focused on leadership, not skills," Inge says. "We need to help school administrators understand the issues they face when distributing new technology because there are traps that have costly consequences, such as hooking onto the latest fad technology. For example, with a TV that projects from a computer, if you don't do research, you could buy a TV that students can't see because the picture quality could suffer depending on the TV and its size."

Inge, who will receive a doctorate from George Washington University in May, has been quoted in numerous magazine articles and spoken at conferences about technology integration. A Northern Virginia native who lives in Blackstone, she was a senior policy analyst for the Virginia Department of Education before organizing the ITTIP. She was appointed by Governor Warner last September to the Commission on Technology Services, and she serves on the Assistive Technology Task Force for the Virginia Department of Education.

"We're looking at high-mobility, low-cost, education-on-demand distance learning, also referred to as 'anytime, anywhere' learning," she says. "If you're going to be part of education in the 21st century, you're going to have to present educational opportunities anytime, anywhere."

Kent Booty
Associate Editor