December 2007 — Special Feature
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THE Journal's 2007 Innovators : 2
John Concilus
Bering Strait School District (AK)
At last year's Iditarod,
the annual Alaskan
dog sledding race,
renowned musher Jeff
King, the eventual
winner, pulled into the
Unalakleet checkpoint,
700 miles down the
road from the start.
Exhausted, he watered
and fed his dogs, and
then came out to meet
the media, including a
cohort from ABC's
Nightline. "I have time for only one interview," he said, and
proceeded to give that interview to students from the Bering
Strait School District.
The interview was broadcast online as part of BSSD's IditaProject, which connects schools and students outside Alaska with the district's multifaceted coverage of the famed race. The project was started five years ago by John Concilus, Bering Strait's educational technology coordinator, as an extension of a regular unit about dog mushing in the region that was part of the district's curriculum for many years. BSSD has more villages with schools along the Iditarod Trail than any other in the state of Alaska. Concilus says the project uses the Iditarod race as "an opportunity for our students to teach outside audiences about our regional history and culture while learning the skills needed to communicate using new technologies."
The race coverage is conducted by members of the district's Student
Broadcasting Team and is anchored out of Unalakleet, a village in western
Alaska. SBT members carry regular press credentials issued by the Iditarod
Trail Committee, just like the professional press crews. They conduct
interviews, record digital video, take pictures, and issue vodcast, audio,
image, and blog updates on happenings along the trail, including twice-daily five-minute broadcasts starting the Monday after the start of
the race, and continuing until the last musher is across the finish
line. Roughly 8,000 students in 170 schools contributed to
the 2007 race coverage.
In addition to the daily race updates, 12 live, two-hour broadcasts spread over six days integrate the district's curricular content into the reporting. Special guests such as veterinarians, race officials, trail rangers, and pilots are interviewed by BSSD students and teachers about several aspects of the race, providing educational content on such topics as cultural and historical factors, mushing math and logistics, and veterinary medicine.
These lessons function internally as part of BSSD's curriculum, but the district uses the setting of the Iditarod as an annual educational outreach effort to give students an authentic audience. New this year, participating schools will be able to use wiki-based curriculum tools to collaborate online in building a common thematic unit.
The project is an ideal merging of technology and learning. "Students and staff producing these curriculum units learn about their own communities, culture, and history, as well as acquire the technology skills required to produce new media content for the web," Concilus says. "This truly is place-based education at its most powerful."
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