Students in Shelly Tsujiura and Alberta Cook’s class at Scarborough Middle School participated in the school’s first-ever teleconference class for students, speaking with a forest expert living in Washington on Friday morning.

This is only the second time the school has had a teleconference. A couple weeks ago, about 40 teachers participated in a teleconference with Rick Wormeil, a national leader in education, who conducted a lesson in differentiated learning.

What makes Technology Integration Specialist Jim Doane especially proud is the fact that a couple days after the first lecture an Hannaford employee visited his room and commented that the company has only recently started teleconferencing as well.

“I’d like to think we have caught up with the corporate world,” Doane said.

Students had the chance to listen to a lecture by Andrew Howard, who is an expert in forest management and has worked in 21 countries assisting with a number of forest management related projects. Currently he is an environmental auditor charged with ensuring logging companies are following the proper guidelines.

Howard spoke to the students about his trip to Brazil and living with a group of people called the Kayapo. Howard was there to make a forest management plan for the Kayapo that would help them develop their forests responsibly.

Some of the students had studied the Kayapo as part of their Community-Service-Self project on rainforests. The class got connected to Howard through an assistant teacher, who is related to him.

Prior to the lecture Howard e-mailed a PowerPoint presentation to the school, which included pictures he took while on the trip. The presentation was shown while Howard gave his lecture.

Students listened to the approximately 45-minute presentation, which focused on the people and their traditions, including piercing and painting their bodies. He also discussed their environment, which primarily consisted of dense jungle filled with animals and insects, including a large number of bees.

“You spent most of the time worrying about a bee stinging you,” he said.

The Kayapo people also enjoyed hunting and fishing and even racing turtles in their village. The winner of the race got to take all of the turtles and then ate them.

“They would catch and kill just about everything they could,” Howard said.

Following the presentation students were able to ask questions. Some of the questions that came to mind were the use of hunting weapons, how dangerous were killer bees, and if the Kayapo were following the forest management plan Howard helped devise. (They are not.)

Doane said the school’s Technology Department recently purchased the teleconference phone, which will allow the district to communicate with experts from all over the world.

Other than the phone there is not much more to do, except plug it in and connect to the person who will lead the discussion. Doane said there were a couple of technical things that had to be worked out prior, but they were easily cleared up and both conferences ran very smoothly.

“It’s the next best thing if he can’t be here,” Doane said.

There also are further educational possibilities using the teleconference phone, Tsujiura said. Next year she would like to do an exchange program with some foreign students discussing their school day.

The district had attempted to set up a video link with Howard, but discovered that they could not do it due to the district’s strong firewall.

“I’d like to see us get to that point,” said Doane.

Scarborough Middle School students attentively watch a PowerPoint program during a teleconference with a forest expert in Washington.