Achievement of that goal is not far off, because 140 of the schools were already connected at the end of 1998. As soon as a new school joins the network, every teacher and pupil there is given a personal e-mail address, of which there were 40,000 at the end of 1998, and the total will be 70,000 by the beginning of 2002. Pupils can use computers and surf the Internet free of charge. The Internet is accessed from the city's schools over 1.5 million times a day and e-mail is intensively used. It has been scientifically proved that using computers improves learning results.
Pupils learn better and are more motivated to study.
It is not a particularly big problem if they use the Internet for other purposes besides obtaining the information they need in their studies. Teachers, for their part, are better at using practical programmes like those for word processing. Their command of information technology is strengthened during a ten-day intensive training course. The project also involves developing a new network school, of which a demonstration version already exists. Karvinen says it will very soon have become part of everyday life in the schools, offering easy access to various databases and archive services.