Original writings, commentary and any multimedia materials provided by students must be approved by the student's teacher before that material becomes visible to others in the collaboration. The system associates each student with a teacher. Collaborations can include classes in multiple schools if there is appropriate email connectivity. Multiple collaborations can be hosted on a single server. Teachers have an expanded menu that allows them to approve student work and access administrative functions.
Teachers can also edit the welcome screen and navigation bars.
The inter-school collaboration is carried over email, which can traverse slow or intermittent network connections and can even be used over UUCP or Fidonet. These technological constraints allow Streams OnLine to be workable world wide. Operating platform and requirements Streams OnLine is written in the Perl programming language as a web based CGI application. It uses Perl's DBI interface to communicate with an SQL database. Linux Operating System MySQL database management system Perl 5.0 or higher with the DBI module and DBD for MySQL and the CGI.pm module, Apache web server version 1.2 or higher.