Each child will need to communicate his or her findings, collaborate and cooperate with classmates, and create an expedition record, a web page. As with any complex understanding, the children will need to learn how to set goals, develop strategies to make them achievable, understand the problems, and be prepared to overcome them, and anticipate the risks to protect against them. Through interactive telecommunications, the students will connect directly with the people who are actually participating in the enterprise and through them, as well as other resources networked through the Web, become auxiliary members of the expedition. Several aspects of this project are innovative. Students will interactively use the web server for both external and internal publication.
External publication is a traditional use of an Internet web server.
The innovative aspect here is that the real-time access allows instant publication of the students' work. This allows students to chronicle the activities of an ongoing research project, motivating them to further achievement. Another innovative use is that the students can use the web server as an intranet server for internal collaboration. The collaborative efforts put forth during the preparation of this proposal will only gain in momentum, once the essential resources of this grant are in place. In this timely project we will test and fully exploit the capabilities of the new network infrastructure in the Newton school system.