Dec 23, 2002 4 min read

EASTON, Pa. (AP) – Three classes of Easton Area High School students took a bold step into the 21st century with a virtual field trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Using identical sets of cameras and screens in the school and museum linked by a high-speed digital network line, the 45 students studied medieval art from the 13th century without ever leaving the building.

“I didn’t even know this technology existed in our school,” said Kristina Horyn, a 17-year-old senior in Jeannine Capecci’s humanities class.

“Me neither,” said classmate Jessica Reifsnyder, also 17. “I bet this is how future teaching will be.”

Horyn and Reifsnyder didn’t know about the equipment inside what is known as the VTEL room because they were among the first students to use it.

Installed as part of the $34 million high school renovation and expansion between 1998 and 2000, the VTEL room (named after the company that makes the equipment) features cameras in front and back of the room that broadcast images to the other VTEL user. Images from the other user, or from the cameras in the room, are shown on three television screens.

The teacher can control the cameras and what the students see on the screens, and students talk to the other user by pushing a button labeled, “My Turn,” on microphones at all 13 tables in the room.

The room can also send images from a computer in the room or from a dry-erase board that sends whatever is written on it into the computer. A so-called document camera that looks like an overhead projector is available for transmitting close-up images.

Teachers Christopher Schiffert and Vincent Spina are leading the push to use the equipment. The two started researching the technology and how it could be used earlier this year, and they are demonstrating it to other teachers, high school Principal William Rider said.

“I’m absolutely thrilled that they have taken an initiative to really go beyond right now,” Rider said. “I think it’s just a real good educational enhancement for all our staff and our students. It’s going to get better probably on a monthly basis.”

“The opportunities are limitless,” Schiffert said.

Rider said teachers have used the equipment under the guidance of Guy Greenfield, the district’s director of secondary and elementary programs, for curriculum planning.

But with a districtwide freeze on all taxpayer-funded field trips this year, the equipment offers students the opportunity to take advantage of regional amenities such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art without ever setting foot on a bus.

On Dec. 4, the students in Capecci’s class and two of Shiffert’s world history classes interacted with Candace LeClaire, the museum’s distance learning coordinator.

With marbled walls and steps inside the museum in the background, LeClaire discussed several artworks. Among them were a knight’s sarcophagus lid carved from a single piece of limestone around 1230. She also showed them up close, with the document camera, how a piece of chain-mail armor from the 1450s was put together.

Melissa Irving, a 17-year-old from Palmer Township, was one of the first students to push the “My Turn” button and hazard an answer to LeClaire’s question about what position the sarcophagus’ subject may have held.

“How do we talk to her?” Irving said just before she pushed the button and said: “Royalty? I was taught people with more money had sculptures made of them.”

Indeed, LeClaire replied, knights were considered nobility in medieval times.

Throughout the session, LeClaire encouraged the students, who were somewhat daunted by using the technology for the first time.

“It’s kind of just like if I were to come to your class and talk to you,” she said, her words in perfect synch with her image on the screens. “Try not to be self-conscious. The novelty of the equipment wears off very quickly. Believe me, you’ll get used to it,” LeClaire said.

“It feels weird to see her and talk to her at the same time, like talking to a TV, but she can see and hear you,” 17-year-old Samantha Barno of Easton said.

Senior Jamie Bartolacci, 18, praised the equipment for affording the students a chance to study the museum’s works, especially those who might not have the opportunity to go there.