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Hoping that classroom content equals cash, textbook heavy Simon and Schuster on Tuesday launched Edscape, a subscription-based network designed to bring the Internet into lesson planning, and to spawn a global community of teachers united in their Internet education.
"Teachers want to use the Web in the classroom, but where do they start?" explains Rita Oates, an educational analyst and editor of the Heller Report on Internet Strategies for Education. "Simon and Schuster are trying to take something familiar to the teacher - their textbooks - and tell them how to take what's old and make it new."
The Edscape network rolls the previously existing Web sites of Simon and Schuster's six textbook and support units into one giant network of K-12 teachers, students, projects, and mentors. Besides participating in global class projects, teachers can swap teaching tips and ask for technology advice from online mentors in the bulletin-board areas. The cost is US$85 per teacher per year, or $1,595 for a whole school. So far, 5,000 teachers have signed up in pre-launch registrations, and Simon and Schuster anticipates the number will grow to tens of thousands of teachers - an anticipated $350 million K-12 educational technology market by 1999.
US Department of Education stats show that 35 percent of public schools are hooked up to the Internet, and a recent study by the Center for Applied Special Technology found that 500 fourth- and sixth-grade students who used the Internet for class projects had improved performance, comprehension, and scores. The downside is that many teachers are as unfamiliar with the Internet as the children they are supposed to teach.
"Teachers are now expected to be able to use the Internet, software, video tools, and simultaneously manage 35 kids with only five computers," explains Lori McBride, chief Internet strategist for Simon and Schuster. "It's a huge endeavor - they're at the beginning of the technology curve, and there's a lot of need for training."
Even those teachers implementing the Net courses in the classroom are often finding them difficult to integrate into the curriculum.
"It's a matter of how to offer students search skills for self learning," emails Annie Covert, an educator who has been using the pilot version of Simon and Schuster's CCCnet. "It's easy to create a traditional plan or a project across miles. It's more challenging to use the tool of the Internet as a natural part of how we learn and communicate."
Simon and Schuster, which is owned by Viacom, isn't alone in its anticipation of an Internet education boom. Although online education networks have been around for years, many have made the move to the Web more recently, recognizing the utility of open information in the classroom. All the major K-12 textbook companies now have online support components, including Houghton Mifflin and McMillan McGraw Hill.
The only other company creating a subscription-based network with mentored class projects is Scholastic Books, which moved its three-year-old supplementary network from AOL to the Web last fall. After its stock plunged in February, Scholastic let go of numerous new-media personnel as part of a larger company reorganization, but its network boasts a thriving community of 8,000 schools participating in its curriculum supplement projects and bulletin boards.
Some groups are giving away the same classroom services for free. With big money backing from high-tech companies like Microsoft and Cisco, the nonprofit Global SchoolNet sponsors online class projects and teacher-student mailing lists and newsgroups, plus one big incentive: a million dollars in scholarships and grants to give away to participating schools each year. Meanwhile, the Family Education Network is wiring every school district in Maryland and helping them create Web sites for a teacher-student-parent information exchange.
"The education system that we know is being called a 'dying dinosaur,'" says Josephina Cicero, head of instructional projects at Global SchoolNet. "And it's about time: We've had the same system for 200 years. The Internet is now becoming the standard."
But don't expect a revolution in the classroom yet: Teachers may be embracing the Internet quickly, but there's a long way to go before education networks are the standard.
"It's not the 'be-all' and 'end-all' in education.... It does not have powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal man (as the old Superman intro said)," explains CCCnet user Jeffrey Branzburg, the instructional technology director for a Long Island school district. "A certain number of people will realize this, become sorely disappointed, and start a backlash. Then what will happen is that it will be viewed in a much more realistic manner, as a part of the mix of tools an educator can use in the classroom."
