Students from James H. Boyd Intermediate School and Harley Avenue Primary School participated in a variety of distance-learning activities, geared at expanding their horizons and complementing the in-class curriculum.
 
Through their distance-learning exercise, third-grade students in Mrs. Decker's class at Boyd participated in a program with the Columbus Zoo. The students learned about the different types of penguins and their habitats, eating habits, lifestyle and adaptations. The students even dressed up one of their classmates as a penguin to learn about the functions of each of the penguin's body parts and then compared the sizes of various species of penguins with the size of a third-grade student. Through the videoconference, students were able to speak directly to the zoologist and ask her questions.
 
 “The students thoroughly enjoyed learning about penguins by seeing the animals in their natural habitats all around the world,” said Krista Albrecht, instructional technology specialist. “This distance-learning program took their unit on penguins to the next level.”
 
At Harley Avenue Primary School, first-grade students took part in several distance- learning programs with the Boonshoft Museum of Ohio. The program, appropriately titled Matter Box, afforded the students the opportunity to conduct experiments to demonstrate the properties of the different states of matter, a unit they have been studying in class. Students were provided with a glimpse of how chemistry can change the properties of a substance through several experiments.
 
In one experiment, students added a phenol red solution to calcium chloride and felt the substance get warm. They also added the phenol red solution to baking soda and felt the new substance get very cold. When the students mixed the hot and cold substances together in a small plastic bag, the result caused the baggie to fill with air and puff out. “The students were amazed by this,” said Ms. Albrecht.