Selecting Distance Learning Technologies

In Week 3, I chose to respond to Scenario 2: Interactive Tours:
A high school history teacher, located on the west coast of the United States, wants to showcase to her students new exhibits being held at two prominent New York City museums. The teacher wants her students to take a "tour" of the museums and be able to interact with the museum curators, as well as see the art work on display. Afterward, the teacher would like to choose two pieces of artwork from each exhibit and have the students participate in a group critique of the individual work of art. As a novice of distance learning and distance learning technologies, the teacher turned to the school district’s instructional designer for assistance. In the role of the instructional designer, what distance learning technologies would you suggest the teacher use to provide the best learning experience for her students?


As the district's instructional designer, based on the taxonomy of distance education technologies (Simonson, 2009), I would recommend a tool that would allow her to provide an opportunity for her students to interact with museum curators regarding the art work on display. This type of opportunity would best be described as two-way audio/video technology. In this type of technology regular telephone lines are used to send and receive audio and video signals in an approach called compressed video. The most current, widely used technology in the education system to accompolish this goal is a tool called Polycom. Polycom uses a telephone line to send the signal in combination with their video conferencing products to capture the video to provide a real-time, synchronus opportunity for dialogue and display. Here is an overview of a Polycom system (click here). The use of this technology for this purpose has been coined "virtual field trips" and many schools districts due to budget restraints have begun participating such as the North Central Educational Service District.

To accomplish the teacher's second desire, to provide a place for her students to collaborate on a critique of two pieces of artwork from the museum, I would recommend a Wiki. What is a wiki? (click here).  A Wiki is an onlinne writing space designed to be created and edited by groups of persons (Simonson, 2009). The most popular wiki used by school districts is Wikispaces. With this tool, a teacher can create the writing space, create accounts for her students and allow her students to take control of what's entered. Students, after receiving access to the Wiki, can then post pictures, embed videos and comment using the discussion board. Here is an example of a school, AST Elementary in Wisconsin, who uses a Wiki to display student art work based on various art concepts. Even though the discussion board isn't used, it could be opened up by the owner of the Wiki.

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