"The SchoolWeb Exploration Project is an international consortium of k-12 schools, commercial organizations, non-profit groups and universities.
The purpose of SchoolWeb is simple: to give K-12 schools the tools to develop World Wide Web sites for student use. Despite the thousands of web sites currently available on the Internet, educational sites dedicated to K-12 schools are few and far between, and the number of sites actually designed and maintained by the schools themselves is even lower. The SchoolWeb Exploration Project hopes to change that.
With SchoolWeb, k-12 schools team up with other Internet users who have access to servers. By sharing resources, students get a chance to learn the ins and outs of hypertext and on-line publishing.
SchoolWeb members are divided into two subgroups: sponsors and school sites. Sponsors are volunteer organizations and individuals with web server access who are willing to donate user accounts, disk space, and/or technical support to K-12 use. The school sites, in turn, design their own Web pages for student academic activities, professional development and community use, accessing the sponsors' servers as a gateway to the Internet.
Sponsors and sites usually fall into one or more of three major web building partnerships: community partnerships, subject-oriented partnerships, and cultural exchange partnerships.
Community partnerships: In these projects, each sponsor and site has the prerogative to decide how and where their server space would be allocated, but the focus would be on offering schools in the sponsor's community access to the web. These particular sites would be used to further the role of community leaders and organizations within its school district, a concept which clearly fits well into current trends in education reform. Schools could develop sites on classroom activities, student home pages, local history and culture, as well as other projects.
Subject-Oriented partnerships: Other sponsors may choose another approach in which their servers could be used for a specific educational subject, such as government or biology. In these cases, schools from outside the community could participate under the aegis of developing a subject e for all schools to use. For example, one sponsor might offer server space to schools interested in developing on-line foreign language projects. In cases such as this, the sponsors would team up with many schools and develop a collaborative distance learning program, with each school taking on certain tasks.
Cultural Exchange partnerships: Sponsors and schools may also choose to hosting or develop cross-cultural exchange sites, where two or more schools from different countries could team up and develop a collective site. For example, a school in South Dakota may choose to work with a 'sister school' in Amsterdam. Each school would have passwords to the same web server, and each would see to the development of certain aspects of the site. These partnerships would focus on the expansion of understanding between the two schools, utilizing on-line web development as their medium for collaborative cultural distance learning.
We at SchoolWeb invite all internet users to participate in our first phase of the Project, which will take place over the next several months. Specifically, we are looking for organizations to sponsor schools on their web servers, as well as K-12 schools who are interested in developing their own web sites. Additionally, the founders of SchoolWeb - largely members of the on-line discussion group WWWEDU (The World Wide Web in Education) - are currently writing a starter kit for teachers who are interested in participating in the Project. The kit, which will include web site templates, software, lesson plans, and other tools, will be made freely available early this spring.
If you are interested in sponsoring a school on your web server, developing a web site at your k-12 school, or helping out in some other fashion, please contact Andy Carvin at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting at acarvin@k12.cnidr.org or (USA) 202-879-9824. Please submit a basic overview of how you would like to help, or what your school would do with the site.
Thanks for your interest!
Andy Carvin