OK—you’ve seen the adventures that students have to explore living things, but you don’t have the funds for a field trip and your school is not close to a park or other greenspace.  What to do??
Or, you’d like to have your students get some experience with microscopy, but the ones in your school are in heavy demand or perhaps many are not  in working order. What to do??
If you and your students can find a few insects, you can participate in the Bugscope project.  This project from the Beckman Imaging Technology Group at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign puts a $600,000 electron microscope under the control of K–12 students from all over the world, via the Internet. And it’s free.
I recently learned about this and took a look at the website: “You sign up, ask your students to find some bugs, and mail them to us. We accept your application, schedule your session, and prepare the bugs for insertion into the electron microscope. When your session time arrives, we put the bug(s) into the microscope and set it up for your classroom. Then you and your students login over the web and control the microscope. We’ll be there via chat to guide you and answer the kids’ questions.”
I’ve looked at some of the archives and there are several sessions already scheduled starting in a few weeks. There is a guest login to follow these sessions. I’m going to check them out.
I used to tell my students about electron microscopes and we’d look at pictures taken with one, but now through the Internet, K–12 they could get actual experiences.
Please feel free to share your experiences with similar projects that involve students in authentic experiences (especially ones in which student can participate online).
SciLinks Topics:

• Microscopes (Elementary K–4, Middle School 5–8, High School 9–12)
• Electron Microscopes