Close-up
Thanks to Internet, her classroom spans Alaska

By Chris Gaither
Los Angeles Times

AL GRILLO / LOS ANGELES TIMES Christy Anne Flynn, right, works on a geometry problem in a classroom in the Lower Kuskokwim School District village of Tununak, Alaska, as teacher Kim Abolafia, 120 miles away in Bethel, goes over the lesson on the monitor.

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"Who can name a pair of parallel planes?" teacher Kim Abolafia asked as she motioned toward a geometric shape labeled with an alphabet soup of letters.

Gerald Agimuk, a 17-year-old in Adidas sneakers and baggy black pants, shifted in his seat and answered. "Points D-E-A and C-F-B."

"OK, good," Abolafia said. "Good job."

The scene in Tununak seems as commonplace as the spitballs shot by restless students everywhere. But even for these teenage hunters, Abolafia was well out of projectile range — in an office in Bethel, 120 miles away.

To get there, the village's five algebra and six geometry students would have to hop on an all-terrain vehicle or a snowmobile, head to the local gravel airstrip, then board a small plane.

Now there's no need. Abolafia broadcasts math lessons via the Internet five days a week to 17 villages across the Kuskokwim-Yukon Delta, where 3,800 students from kindergarten through 12th grade are scattered across a school district the size of West Virginia.

Internet videoconferencing is helping to bridge the tremendous distances between students and the expert educators who are in short supply throughout Alaska.

Virtual field trips

Nearly all of Alaska's 54 school districts have broadband connections, and nine of the most rural ones are using the technology to conduct online videoconferences. Students in secluded villages can take virtual field trips on dog sleds. Administrators can train teachers in far-flung locations.

"It helps level the playing field by increasing education opportunities for rural students," said Chick Beckley, president of the Alaska Distance Learning Partnership, an organization of school districts and distance-learning providers.

The technology is still unreliable. Extreme weather and technical glitches can cancel virtual classes. Some educators are scratching their heads about how best to use the equipment. And many still doubt that Internet videoconferencing can ever take the place of a well-qualified teacher in the flesh.

But the variety of ways in which the nation's emptiest state is using the technology offers a glimpse at the future of wired education.

"For years and years, distance learning was viewed as the second-best alternative," said Melody Thompson, director of the American Center for the Study of Distance Education at Pennsylvania State University. "But the Internet has brought more exploration of the possibilities."

The mother of invention

	AL GRILLO / LOS ANGELES TIMES Students walk to school in September in the village of Tununak, Alaska, where the school district is one of nine in the state to use broadband Internet connections to link with teachers. The technology is valuable because 20 percent of Alaska's schools have three or fewer teachers.

With a road system the size of New Hampshire's serving a state four times as big as California, Alaska educators have a long track record of finding creative ways to reach students. Pilots once flew lessons to the Alaska bush and carried the completed work back to teachers. Faxes, phone conferences, educational TV broadcasts and e-mail have been tried, with varying success.

Provisions in the federal No Child Left Behind Act have made Alaska's search more urgent. By the end of next school year, such core subjects as math and science must be taught by teachers designated "highly qualified" — those who hold a degree in the subject they teach or can pass a test to prove they know the material. Some rural teachers may get a reprieve, but only for three years.

Meeting that requirement will be impossible in much of Alaska. Starting teachers willing to brave the isolation and cold earn more than they can anywhere else in the country, but schools still lose, on average, one-third of their faculty each year. Twenty percent of schools have three or fewer teachers. Most Alaska teachers are generalists by necessity.

But some administrators are optimistic that they can overcome those problems with two-way videoconferencing and other high-tech strategies made possible by a federal program called e-rate. Funded by a fee levied on U.S. phone carriers, e-rate pays for as much as 90 percent of schools' telecommunications equipment and services and has brought $75 million to Alaska in the past six years.

"E-rate really has been a miracle for our state," said Della Matthis, e-rate coordinator for the state Department of Education and Early Development. "It has opened up so many things we never could have done otherwise."

Pioneering

Three years ago, the Lower Kuskokwim School District went hunting for its first full-time videoconferencing teacher. They found Abolafia, who wanted an Alaska adventure after teaching for three years in tough neighborhood schools in Jersey City, N.J., and Jacksonville, Fla.

Neither Abolafia nor her new bosses knew what to expect.

"A classroom teacher can be a mighty boring thing," said Beverly Williams, the district's director of academic programs. "When you remove the layer of a human being in front of you and just have a TV screen, then you can have a whole new level of boring."

On a recent Monday morning in Bethel, Abolafia was trying to keep that from happening with some algebra "Jeopardy!" She rose from her desk and walked to a board filled with categories including "Square Roots of Perfect Squares" and "Inverse Operations." Each school was given a chance to select a category and earn points by answering correctly in the form of a question.

A camera operated by remote control followed Abolafia as she moved, broadcasting her lessons via satellite to televisions in schools as close as Atmautluak, an 18-mile boat ride away, and as far as Mekoryuk, 155 miles away on Nunivak Island in the Bering Sea.

To demonstrate the solution to a problem, Abolafia wrote on a piece of paper beneath an overhead camera. The TVs in the schools showed a close-up of her writing. When a student pressed a button on the speakerphone in front of him, his image appeared on a TV in Abolafia's classroom and his voice came through the speakers.

Sitting in

Abolafia works alone in her classroom, but she's not completely on her own. An aide or a teacher not certified as "highly qualified" works in each village classroom, collecting homework, emphasizing important points and making sure students aren't sleeping or misbehaving while Abolafia goes through lessons.

Abolafia counts on the local instructors to tell her when the class is lost.

"The hardest part is knowing whether or not they're actually getting it," she said. "I wind up talking to myself a lot, because they won't answer me."

The inevitable technology bugs don't help. When Abolafia began teaching that morning, only four of 14 sites were connected. The local telecommunications provider had made changes over the weekend that threw the system into chaos. For several days, some schools were unable to stay connected for more than a few minutes.

Educators in the Bering Strait School District, a few hundred miles north, know something about technical difficulties. Bringing their 15 schools online was a challenge — especially on Little Diomede, an island with 146 inhabitants that is often inaccessible because of fog, precipitation and high winds.

On the first attempt to connect the island, the cable suspending GCI's satellite dish from a helicopter snapped and the dish plunged into the strait. GCI landed a new dish on the second try, only to discover that the island's rocky peaks were blocking the signals. The company finally erected a small antenna to siphon data from a satellite dish in Wales, across the strait.

Other approaches

Some Alaska educators prefer a different form of high-tech distance learning.

The area around Kotzebue, an Inupiat Eskimo community of 3,082 north of the Arctic Circle, is one of the most connected outside the state's urban areas. Officials at the Chukchi Campus of the College of Rural Alaska there hold meetings and train teachers by videoconference. Health-care practitioners use the technology to get help from radiologists, dermatologists and other physicians in Anchorage and the lower 48 states.

But students at the village's college campus won't find videoconferencing in classrooms.

Instead, the school uses a system called Live Internet. There are no TV images, but students and teachers can hear each other. More important, their computer screens serve as virtual chalkboards. They can see the day's classwork on the computer as they are doing it. It's about "shared documents," college director Lincoln Saito said, not "talking heads."

Saito says he likes Live Internet because it provides nearly all the benefits of videoconferencing at a fraction of the cost. Anyone with a computer and the necessary software can join the lesson, and without streaming video it requires much less bandwidth. Plus, the classes are archived online, so students who are absent can catch up.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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