Science News Brought to You by Students of All Ages

Students in the Houston Independent School District aren’t just learning about science in the classroom; they’re broadcasting what they’ve learned on the Internet.

Through the Electronic Community of Teachers (ECOT), a collaboration between Rice University and the school district, Rice’s Center for Technology in Teaching and Learning is providing technical and personnel support and an outlet for teachers in the ECOT collaborative community to create news clips on science for broadcast on ECOT’s website.

Students from several ECOT-member schools and elsewhere have been producing audio and video segments on what they were learning in their science classes. The result has been an impressive collection of science-related news clips in which students report on a variety of topics: cars powered by carbon dioxide cartridges, the discovery of a 7,500-year-old mummy in the Italian Alps, dinosaurs, myths about white sharks, and one school’s creation of a butterfly garden. Submissions to the website have come from as far away as the Balikpapan Pasir Ridge School in Borneo, Malaysia, where students created a video tour of a local factory that makes reproductions of tribal masks.

“The students really get into the process,” says Carlos Solis, an information technology consultant for Rice’s Center for Technology in Teaching and Learning and systems manager for ECOT since its inception. One of the keys is that the site gives students an authentic, truly global venue. And because they select and produce their own stories, they see the relevance of good writing in communication while having a great deal of fun in the very hands-on aspects of the productions.

Visit the Media Broadcasting System site at http://ecotmedia.rice.edu.