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Fiddlers Craig Duncan and Matt Combs teach students in Ohio about the violin.

Halls of fame from Canton to Cooperstown have entered a new frontier for school field trips – video conferencing. This year the Country Music Hall of Fame started piping its educational programs into classrooms around the U.S.

Students who visit the hall of fame in person get to sit at the feet of two local session players pretending they have different instruments – one a fiddle, the other a violin. Which is which? Today Matt Combs calls on a student…sitting in Ohio.

“Ha. I can’t point at you,” he says to himself. “You’re there on the TV. I see a red shirt front row with blonde hair raising her hand.”

Teaching from afar has its challenges, so the musicians try to keep their bows moving. After disclosing that a fiddle and violin are one in the same, the two flow into a duet.

“We’re going to do a piece that Bill Monroe himself, the father of bluegrass wrote,” Combs says. “It’s called “Big Mon” in the key of A.”

Within the first few bars, the kids in Cleveland are clapping along.

Playing to national standards

Students from as far away as Texas and as nearby as East Tennessee have had the virtual experience, which is free for now.

Nathalie Lavine manages the program and says it’s not a substitute for visiting.

“They don’t get to walk through the galleries,” she says. “But they do still get the lessons, and that’s the meat of it.”

Generally, a tour of any hall of fame includes fun facts about famous people. However, their online programs are focused on meeting national curriculum standards.

Julia Shildmyer-Heighway is with the non-profit that matches up schools with distance learning opportunities. She says the Baseball Hall of Fame offers a math course using statistics.

“You know, I was never the greatest math student growing up,” she says.” But I sat in on that program, and all of the sudden, 4th grade math made sense to me, and that’s because I was seeing the real world application.”

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame takes lyrics from “The Temptations to teach a history lesson on Civil Rights.

The Country Music Hall of Fame is starting with what it knows – instruments and songwriting. But organizers say more programs are on the drawing board, adding that distance learning has changed the way they look at their educational mission.