Connecting parents and local communities with schools is also critical. Parents can provide a vitally needed source of mentoring for students and a source of support for teachers. For example, parents can provide students with an audience interested in their work. Traditionally the primary audience for a student's work is her teacher, often overwhelming teachers with the responsibility of being an audience for too many students. When a school uses the WWW to make student work available to the broad-based audience of the Internet, students suddenly have a new, and greatly expanded audience for their work.
Local communities serve as another primary audience and source of resources for schools.
The WWW can serve schools as an alternative mechanism to communicate with their local communities. The WWW is still in turbulent flux. As it grows and matures many different communities will customize it and shape it to meet their specific needs. The K-12 teaching and learning community will be no exception. The needs of this community are diverse and already the K-12 community has found resources on the WWW that are valuable.