A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Telecomputing for Teaching and Learning:

Stories of People Using Computer Networking for Learning

Telecomputing. It means using a computer that is connected to the Internet or to an on-line service. For a growing number of teachers and students across the country, it means access to a world of information and people...

• At Centennial High School in Champaign, Illinois, high school students design their own science experiments. For example, they add and subtract ions to atoms and watch the results.

• At Christopher Columbus Middle School in Union City, New Jersey, school and home are linked.

• At Pease Middle School in San Antonio, Texas, a chemist helps students discover the cause of poor-quality air in their middle school.

• In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, foreign language students in the public schools write messages in Spanish, French, and German to students in other countries.

• At the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind in St. Augustine, Florida, students who are blind explore information resources and communicate with people in the community through a local bulletin board.

• Using Internet access at public and school libraries through the Maryland Sailor project, students at a technical high school tap into statistics from the U.S. Department of Commerce to create career plans.

You'll find these stories on the pages that follow. They're stories of struggles and breakthroughs, successes and disappointments, hopes and promise. But most of all, they're stories about what real people are doing to put the power of computer networking into the hands of teachers and students.

You'll find no sure-fire formulas or recipes. Where it's working, a telecomputing infrastructure is being built on the strengths and needs of the particular school and community.

Our hope is that, in reading these stories, you'll find some clues about how you can harness the potential of telecomputing for your schools. We hope you'll come away from these stories with ideas for developing your own answer to a question:

"What can my community and my schools do to make the promise of the Information Superhighway a reality for our children?"