At least 480 students from Forestbrook Elementary School, Forestbrook Middle School, and Socastee High School, will participate in the multinational professional development program to improve teaching and learning. Teachers in the nine participating countries, including Australia, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States, will be able to access documents such as classroom assignments, teacher evaluations, and student work. This intercontinental exchange will be facilitated through Internet and CD-ROM technologies. This Internet arrangement will also allow the teachers to communicate by E-mail.
Language translation is set up to facilitate the on line discussions.
Representatives of the nine countries, known as the International Steering Committee, will meet in Hong Kong next fall. The ISC meeting held last May in Washington, D.C. was the subject of a story by Claudio Sanchez on National Public Radio's Morning Edition in June. The Schools Around the World project is scheduled to run five years. Established in 1950, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation makes national grants in journalism, education, and arts and culture. Its fourth program, community initiatives, is concentrated in 26 communities where the Knight brothers published newspapers, but the Foundation is wholly separate from and independent of those newspapers.