It's all happening at the virtual zoo - Robin Hilmantel, USA Today

Katie Peterson's fourth-graders knew all about why toucans have rounded beaks and the sparrows in their backyards have pointy beaks. They read about it in their textbooks. They wrote reports. They even did an experiment in which they found that chopstick "beaks" are great for picking up seeds, but two spoons are better if all you have to eat are slippery gummy fish (stand-ins for worms). But in the students' four-week study of animal adaptations, nothing was as memorable as the hour in which they saw live animals located 700 miles away - all from their Kyle, Texas, school. Via videoconferencing, Peterson's students saw such zoo denizens as an owl, a snake and a bearded dragon lizard at the Lee Richardson Zoo in Garden City, Kan.

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