iStudent

Like most children her age, Brookline third-grader Jerilyn McLean has school every weekday. She answers roll call, adds her two cents worth in class discussions, raises a hand to ask and answer questions, and steals occasional moments to goof with friends. But unlike most of her classmates, Jerilyn hasn't actually set foot inside her William H. Lincoln School classroom in almost 17 months.

Since she was diagnosed in September 2005 with aplastic anemia, which severely compromised her immune system and required a bone marrow transplant, Jerilyn has had only a virtual presence in the classroom.

Through an innovative system called PEBBLES (Providing Education by Bringing Learning Environments to Students), she is represented in class by a baby blue, child-size robot with a two-way live audio/video feed that makes her part of the classroom action.

Jerilyn is the first student in Massachusetts to use the PEBBLES technology. Unlike traditional videoconferencing, the "telepresence" technology of PEBBLES sets up a real sense of shared space and controlled interaction.

Project director Andrew Summa, of the Connecticut-based National Center for Electronically Mediated Learning, which administers the project, said: "It was born from the fact that students who are hospitalized or homebound for protracted periods become orphans to the educational system. The PEBBLES project wants to keep a student socially as well as intellectually connected."

Set on four wheels, the computer stands just a little shorter than Jerilyn herself, the camera and screen set into a roundish "head." Her classmates see her life-size face on the robot's monitor, or see her hunched over her desk, attacking the same tasks they do.

Through a matching robot at her house, Jerilyn can see and hear everything that's going on in class. She uses a videogame-style controller to adjust the classroom unit, and she can turn the robot's head and move the camera up and down, zooming it in and out.

She can raise the robot's hand to signal teacher Libby Donovan, and she can buddy up with other students for special assignments, as they pull chairs right next to the robot to share materials, a virtual face to face. In the most sophisticated setups, the robots feature scanner/printers so the student can access teacher handouts on the spot.

"It's really fun, because she can learn with us," said Jerilyn's friend and classmate Kendall McGowan. "I feel good for her, because now she can participate in school."

PEBBLES is also especially effective in easing back-to-school transitions. Now that she is essentially cured, when Jerilyn returns to school full time at the end of March, the six-hour day won't be so overwhelming, and her schoolmates' faces will be comfortably familiar.

Combining video-conferencing technologies with simple robotics technology, the project was initially developed in Toronto through the Centre for Learning Technologies at Ryerson University.

PEBBLES was introduced in the United States in 2001, through a Department of Education grant (which has totaled roughly $2.5 million over the past six years), and currently there are fewer than two dozen pairs of robots in the United States. Made by Telbotics in partnership with IBM in Canada, each unit weighs about 160 pounds and each system costs approximately $70,000, though most participants pay nothing with the current government funding level.

Only three of the systems are in private home-school partnerships (as opposed to hospital-school partnerships). The one in Brookline is one of those three. The McLeans believe a key to the project's success is the teacher, and they have nothing but praise for Donovan. "She's really made it part of her class," said Jerilyn's father, Paul McLean. "More than tolerate it, she's embraced it as a learning experience for herself and her students."

"It's been a fantastic experience, very rewarding, Donovan said. "I feel like it's intellectually stimulating for me, the students, and for Jerilyn.

"All the kids are developing oral language skills, learning to be better speakers by projecting their voices. And a piece of it is character education, putting someone else ahead of their own needs."

It's not a flawless system. Despite the remarkably fluid interaction, there are still occasional audio-video gaps, and sometimes feedback interferes or Jerilyn complains she can't hear the other kids. Donovan compensates by repeating and clarifying; the microphone, on a cable that can stretch the length of the classroom, is frequently adjusted.

"It can be quite annoying," Jerilyn said. "I'd much rather be in school, but if I didn't have PEBBLES, I'd be sitting around here doing stuff by myself, so PEBBLES is better."

PEBBLES has had to overcome some significant technological hurdles. Hospitals, where the systems are used most, have challenging firewall systems, while many of the schools don't have networks fast enough to support video streams and aren't wired for secure, private connections free of interference. The most recent fix in many cases involves dedicated modems and routers to create VPNs (virtual private networks.)

However, as networking structures evolve, the PEBBLES technology is able to adapt.

"We now have units with battery packs that can roam the halls completely untethered," said Dan Broderick, the project's technology director. "Someone can push the unit to the next class, and the student can have social interactions in the hallway. It adds a new dimension to the virtual school experience."

A much smaller design is in the works to support the moveable-class schedule of typical secondary schools. This version of PEBBLES will feature two screens, one used for communication via video conferencing, the other for sharing applications and documents. The next major challenge for PEBBLES will be developing a wireless system.

PEBBLES has also launched a promising pilot study to explore the use of robots with autistic students, who traditionally have difficulty in social situations.

"We have seen in limited applications that students start to become socialized after using the technology as a transition medium -- they become more comfortable going into a regular classroom," Summa said. "This technology allows them to reorient their social skills and evolve a kind of interconnection schematic in their own brains, which is a huge breakthrough."

But for Jerilyn's family, just providing the youngster a day-to-day connection with her class is enough of a breakthrough. PEBBLES has allowed Jerilyn's parents to remain in their roles as supportive caregivers.

"Before PEBBLES, we were also her schoolteachers, and she really resented that," Jerilyn's mother, Jody Leader, said, describing long, lonely hours at the dining room table, poring over worksheets. "When we were forced to step into the teacher role, on a daily basis, it really strained our day-to-day interactions. PEBBLES gives her what we can't here."

Paul McLean adds: "And it's still the next best thing to being there. We've been very fortunate to find it. There's a lot of kids suddenly cut off from their world, and this gives them a piece of their world back."