It sets up an intranet with e-mail and message boards accessible by administrators, teachers, parents and students within the school and with other schools on the Starship School system. It filters Internet access while giving individual schools the option of adding or deleting selected Web sites at their own discretion. It also has a course-authoring tool that allows teachers to design a course in a specific subject area, track student progress online and share the course with other teachers. Our job is to build the easiest possible piece of software ever built. When received by a school, a Starship computer appliance is plugged into a school's existing network.
Any solution has to take that into account.
Also vital to technology integration is the ability of a school to pay for it. The firm developed a strategy using a business economic model that attempts to make it easy for individual schools to use the appliance. Schools don't buy Starship School. They subscribe at a cost of 10 cents per child per day, a fee that can be met through many schools' discretionary funds, rather than through time-consuming funding requests. Fees also can by paid by product sponsors that may include corporations, government entities, foundations, or by parents with resources available to contribute to their children's school.