FAIRFIELD, California—If it's a Saturday, you're likely to find Eva La Mar lugging a backpack of digital cameras and tripods out to the marshes near her home in this San Francisco suburb. The veteran teacher knows that, for students learning about the natural world, nothing compares to getting close enough to the subject to smell the salt air or catch a glimpse of wildlife. School field trips can be expensive and time-consuming, however. So La Mar is using digital photography and virtual reality software to create a library of panoramic images that offer students the next-best-thing to being there.

La Mar teaches a gifted education class of third-graders at Tolenas School, an elementary school with a magnet program. Her original motivation to photograph local habitats was to provide inspiration for language arts assignments. "I thought the photos would be a way to get kids to write," she explains, by giving them a context to describe local history. The project has expanded as students have shown interest in learning how to photograph sites on their own. As they stockpile a collection of images, they are contributing to local history archives, creating learning resources that others can access, and making connections with other students of diverse ages and university scientists.

A longtime user of technology in the classroom and a master teacher through the Intel® Teach to the Future professional development program, La Mar was inspired to learn more about digital photography when she came upon a Web site called www.virtualguidebooks.com*. The site is the brainchild of Don Bain, director of the Geography Computing Facility of the University of California at Berkeley. It includes a library of geographic images that can be viewed in a 360-degree panorama, using virtual reality software.

Bain agreed to train La Mar in how to create panoramic photographs, and soon she was setting out on weekend photo shoots. Back in her classroom, she began sharing the results of her fieldwork with her students. "They loved it," she says, "and they told me: 'We want to do it, too.'"

When La Mar shared her plan to create a photo library with other teachers, the idea took off. Three teachers from other grade levels have started involving their students in the project. Michelle Labelle-Fish teaches sixth-graders at Tolenas School. Kathy Link teaches at Fairfield High School. Mike Keisling teaches at Armijo High School, also in Fairfield. In addition, collaborations that involve the Fairfield students with researchers from several universities in California have been launched. Students are gaining exposure to fields they might want to study in the future, along with technical training that can translate to marketable skills.

From La Mar's perspective, the photo project does a seamless job of integrating technology with several subject areas. Students do much more than snap pictures of interesting places. They also conduct research to write informative descriptions of the photos, and learn to use geographic mapping software so that locations are accurately identified. As they study a site in depth, students often make connections between local history and environmental science, two fields that seldom are taught in tandem. Explains La Mar: "The sloughs in this region have been affected by historical events like the California Gold Rush," which generated mining debris that affected waterways. The arrival of trains and highways changed the natural world, as well. "Today, only 10 percent of Bay Area wetlands are left," La Mar notes. Solano County, where Fairfield is located, includes a salt marsh that provides important habitat for a variety of wildlife.

The technology that supports this project allows users to make virtual visits to places otherwise inaccessible. "Students can learn about the Gold Rush by visiting an important site like Sutter's Mill, where it began," La Mar explains. Virtual reality software allows viewers to explore a site from every angle. The same software that allows a viewer to see panoramic shots of a place can also be used to showcase an object up close. Recently, La Mar began working with her students to photograph skulls from a local natural history museum. Students take a series of object rotation photos. When viewers explore the images online, the object appears to spin so that it can be seen from all angles.

Involvement in the photo project has deepened students' "love for history and for science," La Mar observes. "You can't separate out the two areas. They're integrated." Because students write about their own photographs, she adds, "it's authentic writing." La Mar also sees "students' sense of inquiry broadened" by their involvement. Their natural curiosity leads them to ask questions that take learning deeper, such as exploring the ethics of business and political decisions that have affected regional watersheds.

Observing her students' enthusiastic response has given La Mar the idea of expanding the image library on a bigger scale. "We could document our whole county," she suggests. If enough other schools and classes got involved, she adds, "we could document a whole state or region." With enough interest, she adds, a national databank of images could be collected so that a student living on the east coast could make a virtual visit to a California wetland, or a student in Fairfield could see a panoramic shot of the Great Lakes. Students learning about immigration could virtually visit Ellis Island or Angel Island, important points of entry located on opposites sides of the continent.

La Mar is used to thinking big, and she has won a number of awards that recognize her inspired classroom ideas. A project that uses clay animation to teach students about geology won second place in the Multimedia Mania 2002 contest, statewide honors from the California Technology Assistance Project in 2001, and top honors from the National Science Teachers Association. Although she's been active in the pursuit of grants to support her classroom use of technology, La Mar says a big equipment budget is not necessary to create exciting projects. "It takes training and creativity," she says. Her advice to other teachers: "Don't limit yourself—or your students."