WWW: Beyond the Basics

2. Demographics and Demographic Tools

2.4 Educational Institutions and Resources on the World Wide Web

The foundations of the Internet were laid with a large effort from universities. It cannot be denied that tertiary educational institutions played an important role in laying the groundwork for the Internet and World Wide Web. Universities and colleges were the first organizations to link up to the Internet; they used it for research and educational purposes. Educational institutions provide a rich source of information to students through the Internet and the World Wide Web. The primary and secondary educational institutions are beginning to catch up with their tertiary counterparts in getting connected to the Web; this means that pre-tertiary educators and students are using the World Wide Web for educational pursuits. This section gives a cursory idea of the connectivity of K12 institutions on the World Wide Web.

Based on the Web66 International WWW Schools Registry (Web66), a project funded by 3M to facilitate introduction of web technology to schools, there are about 4000 schools worldwide that have their own web servers.

Out of this, more than 87% of these are in the United States. Another ten percent of the schools are in Canada. This is followed by Australia and Japan, with 307 and 213 schools (less than 1 percent) on-line respectively. United Kingdom came in a far fifth with 77 schools, and Germany in sixth with 75 schools. In the United States, all the schools with web servers were concentrated in 901 districts. California has the largest number of schools that have web servers: 465 schools in 78 districts, with Illnois coming second with 201 schools in forty districts. This is followed by Washington (171 schools), Virginia (159), New York (154), Florida (132), and Texas (123) and Minnesota (123). For a complete and updated list of all K12 Schools on the web, refer to Web66's International WWW Schools Registry (Web66).

There are also a number of web sites to help promote education on the web. Web66 Project by University of Minessota provides a variety of interesting and helpful resources to help schools set up their Internet servers and to use WWW resources for primary and secondary school education. Other resources include K-12 Technology, Galaxy's K12 Education Resources, and TRFN General K-12 Education Sites. For web collaboration for educational purposes, refer to this book's chapter on collaboration.

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Copyright © 1996 Mei See Yeoh, All Rights Reserved

Mei See Yeoh <myeoh@vt.edu>
Last modified: Sat Oct 26 13:15:51 1996