Buster
Ratliff, operations coordinator, tries out the museum’s mobile video
unit.
(Canyon)—Planning field trips to the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum (PPHM) has just gotten easier for teachers in the Texas Panhandle.
The museum is one of three facilities to benefit from a Department of Agriculture grant awarded to the Region 16 Education Service Center. The $500,000 grant promotes distance learning in rural areas so that a field trip to the museum is now possible via video technology. Other facilities with video tour capabilities are the Amarillo-Globe News for the Performing Arts and the Don Harrington Discovery Center.
“We are excited about this. It’s been about a year in the making,” Buster Ratliff, PPHM operations coordinator, said.
The grant provided mobile video units for 11 school districts in the Region 16 service area. Two sites remaining to be set up are Kelton and Clarendon. The grant also provided 11 video drops throughout the museum along with a camera capable of 180-degree turns.
“A rural school district may not have the time or resources to take a trip to Canyon to study history, but curators at the museum will be able to move the mobile cart from exhibit to exhibit, utilizing videoconference technology and providing the students a virtual field trip,” Jeff Rogers, videoconference network administrator with Region 16, said.
The technology literally brings the museum into the classroom. PPHM curators
will appear through a video projector in school classrooms, while the classroom
will appear on a screen in the museum. The curator will be able to tour
the museum, zoom in on artifacts, answer questions from the students and
even complement the discussion with videos or PowerPoint presentations.
The museum has curators for art, history and archeology with exhibits and
collections covering everything from transportation and fine art to quilts
and firearms.
“We were looking at virtual tours and other ways to get the museum to
the schools when Region 16 approached us with the grant,” Ratliff said. “It
is exactly what we were looking for. We’re very fortunate they picked
us. It’s something we’re all excited about, and it’s going
to open all sorts of doors for the museum and what it has to offer.” 