Thanks to a partnership with nearby research universities, students at Georgia's Barrow County Schools have used a high-definition video link to the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta to control cameras and view images of sea life remotely from their classrooms; learned calculus from Georgia Tech instructors using a "virtual whiteboard" application; and interacted with researchers on the ocean floor near Gray's Reef National Marine Sanctuary just off Sapelo Island, Ga., among other activities.

Barrow County is one of several K-12 school districts that have teamed up with member universities belonging to the ultra high-speed Internet2 network, giving them access to this advanced higher-education research network and the many opportunities for learning that it affords.

Barrow County's participation in the network "has increased our bandwidth by 500 percent," said Superintendent Ron Saunders, "and that has allowed us to ... deliver a world-class education to our students."

With an average speed of 100 gigabits per second, Internet2 supports even the most bandwidth-heavy research projects and group collaborations, such as high-definition video conferencing, telemedicine, and tele-immersion, or shared virtual reality.

Participation in the Internet2 network was expanded to include K-12 schools a decade ago. As of last year, nearly 4,300 K-12 school districts were connected to the network, and this number has been climbing slowly but steadily each year, said Greg Wood, director of communications for the Internet2 initiative.

At the Consortium for School Networking's annual conference in March, Internet2 participants discussed some of the projects they are involved with.

"Imagine the difference between dial-up and broadband in terms of speed," said Larry Gallery, membership manager for the New York State Education and Research Network (NYSERNet). "Now, imagine that dial-up is the internet and broadband is Internet2. ... That's how much of a difference there is."

Gallery described a project from the National Library of Medicine, called the Visible Human Project, that has created complete, anatomically detailed, three-dimensional representations of the normal male and female human bodies. As an outgrowth of this project, the University of Michigan has created two- and three-dimensional navigational browsers through which students can take a virtual tour of the human body over an Internet2 connection.

"Students can see what eating a cheeseburger does to your circulation," explained Gallery. "It's like nothing else they've seen before."

Heather Weisse, applications coordinator for MAGPI (Mid-Atlantic GigaPoP in Philadelphia for Internet2) at the University of Pennsylvania, said video conferencing is another useful application of Internet2.