City School District Earns C-SPAN Grant

By MARY MARTIALAY
Gazette Reporter
 

SCHENECTADY - Add the interviewing access and video archives of CSPAN to the list of resources Schenectady students can reach through district online video-conferencing.

The district recently won a one year, $65,000 demonstration grant with CSPAN and Time Warner to build lessons based on online video-conferencing and CSPAN resources.

CSPAN and Time Warner will work with Project View, a $10 million five-year project led by Schenectady, to develop online video-conferencing.

Project View already links institutions like museums and research centers with teachers.

Superintendent John Falco said the resources at CSPAN are a perfect fit with that work.

"I have a vision that one day every kid will have the capacity to meet the greatest minds, see the greatest art wherever they are," said Falco. "No one has taken the steps we have for that level of interactivity."

The grant is one of three national awards in a new program created by Cable in the Classroom, a non-profit consortium of cable channels and companies.

CSPAN education manager Meg Steele said the station will try to arrange online video-conferences between classrooms and the authors, journalists, historians and legislators covered by the station. The station will also provide access to 90,000 hours of CSPAN videotaped archives and 3,500 hours of online video archives.

"I can imagine, for example, that a teacher might want to do a project comparing two turn of the century presidents: Theodore Roosevelt and George W. Bush," said Steele.

Teachers would design lessons based on the idea and state education standards, and CSPAN would find resources to match.

Steele said the project is a good fit between CSPAN and Project View. CSPAN has access to people of national importance, is well-prepared for online video-conferencing, and is committed to sharing information. But Project View is better equipped for teaching.

"We're just a resource, we don't know how to build a curriculum, they develop the curriculum," said Steele.

"But this is very much in the nature of how we do programming. Long form interviews, no camera cuts, no close-ups, just people."

Cable in the Classroom was created in 1989 and serves 81,000 public and private schools, reaching 78 percent of the K-12 students in the Unites States.