On November 13, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel ran a story on this Nicolet-UWM CoVis partnership. The text of that story appears below.

Linking up: High school students, professor interact via Internet

November 13, 1997

In what officials are calling groundbreaking use of technology in a Wisconsin classroom, students at Nicolet High School on Wednesday presented information from their science class to a university professor during a conference over the Internet.

"This is a whole different way to study science," said Karyl Rosenberg, a Nicolet teacher participating in a new program called CoVis.

The enthusiasm for the new program, a partnership between the school and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, isn't so much about what it can do for students in its fledgling stages, but how technology can be more useful in classrooms by providing in stant access to information and experts around the globe.

No more downloading other people's research. CoVis is about having students conduct their own experiments with the help of universities and supercomputers.

In Wednesday's experiment, UWM Prof. Jonathan Kahl appeared on a television screen to watch and listen to reports from students on current weather conditions and the weather phenomenon known as El Nino. Kahl could see the students, and the students cou ld see Kahl.

As federal and state money becomes available for school districts in the next few years, UWM officials hope to introduce programs like CoVis at other locations. Milwaukee Public Schools has already expressed an interest in participating, said Marshall Goodman, dean of the UWM College of Arts and Sciences.

Goodman, who discovered the program by accident on the Internet, is responsible for bringing CoVis to Wisconsin.

CoVis, an acronym for Collaborative Visualization, was recently developed by Northwestern University, which taps into the supercomputers at the University of Illinois. It deals not merely with technology, but training teachers to properly implement tec hnology to enhance subjects that have been taught for generations.

The program is part of a renewed emphasis at UWM and across the nation on improving science education at the high school level.

A national science test administered last year, for example, showed that while Wisconsin had the fourth highest score in the country, more than one in four state students tested at "below basic" science levels.

The tests required hands-on science experience -- something the leader of the state's largest teachers union recently said was difficult because there aren't adequate science labs in Wisconsin's schools.

Nicolet was chosen to take part in Covis because the school has made significant strides in obtaining high-tech tools for science labs. Unlike many schools in the state, Nicolet has a full-time educational technology coordinator, Jeff Johnson.

A team of Nicolet teachers took part in a CoVis training session at Northwestern -- training that Rosenberg said helped her gain confidence in using technology with students in the Nintendo generation.

"We have an El Nino right now," Rosenberg said, describing how student experiments can become more real through CoVis. "The way that meteorologists gather information right now is through the Internet, so the students are accessing the same data."

Although many schools have access to the Internet, few can take current information off their computers and run it past a university professor on call through video conferences.

"We're just at the very tip of what we can do on the Internet right now," Goodman said.

Nicolet is the first school in Wisconsin to participate; about 50 schools in Illinois and Indiana are using CoVis.

As UWM expands its program to high schools in Sweden and Israel, it opens research possibilities for students. For example, Goodman said, students studying geology and rock formations could obtain scientific samples from foreign countries to compare wi th their own.

"It's not just talking to UWM, it's talking through UWM to people all over the world," Goodman said.

Like just about everything in modern education, however, CoVis comes with a high price tag. In addition to the computer hardware and high speed T1 line to the Internet, both university professors and high school teachers need to be trained.