Gloria Elsea's remedial-reading classes at D. Rich Middle School in Lansing, Michigan, bring their classwork to life with an Internet relay chat with Zlata Filipovic, the young author of Zlata's Diary, an account of her life in B osnia. Even in schools with modest technology budgets, creative teachers are using the Internet to spark the imagination of their students. Building an Online Community Minnesota's Minnetonka school district is a textbook example of how technology can be a key to community, involvement education. Retiree Joe Riordan volunteers in the schools every Wednesday morning. Each buddy team works on the computer.
Many parents volunteer to edit and maintain the fourth-graders' video portfolios.
At the end of the year, highlights of each child's science projects are compiled for s tudents and parent to look back on. Far beyond the borders of the Minnetonka schools' communities, students also assist in Operation Monarch Watch, a butterfly-migration project run by the University of Kansas . The simplest Internet tool, E-mail, is an early and powerful part of the online curriculum in many classrooms. Searching for more projects to share, the teachers realized that their students could also learn more about each other's culture. Like many teacher pioneers on the Internet, Bodner and Spragu e-Lambert invented their own curriculum for the new medium.