Moving Target: Keeping Up with the Web Gets Harder Every Year. in the Time It Took to Read That Last Sentence, Another 75 Pages Were Put Online. (2003 Curriculum Web Site Awards)

Dyrli, Odvard Egil, District Administration

So much energy has been devoted in recent years to connecting schools to the Internet, and keeping score of which are and the few that still aren't, that it is easy for districts to lose sight of the bigger picture. "For these connections to truly make a difference, teachers must be trained and students must have access to quality educational content," says John Bailey, director of the federal Department of Education's office of educational technology.

Equipping educators with up-to-date information is a huge task and a moving target. New material is added to the Web at the rate of 25 pages every second, according to Nancy Willard of the Responsible Netizen Institute. It would take 750 people working 24 hours a day seven days a week just to keep up with developments. "It is easy for educators to rely on a few familiar sites--usually those recommended by a nearby colleague--if they aren't aware that superior online curriculum models and applications exist," says Conrad Berdeen, principal of the Buffer School in Avon, Mass.

THE INDUSTRY MOVES FORWARD

The Curriculum Web Site Awards were launched in 1998 to identify exemplary K-12 online curriculum material in every content area. The competition includes free and subscription-based sites. In the course of reviewing more than 800 education-related sites, the following trends are apparent:

* The best education sites continue to get better, and many online curriculum leaders have added new options and expanded into new areas. Last year the magazine established a Hall of Fame to recognize continuing superior achievement, and this year inducted six new honorees.

* Key companies extended their reach with acquisitions. For example, Plato Learning acquired Netschools and its Orion online curriculum product; Pearson Education added the resources of the Family Education Network; and Scantron acquired EdVision, developer of online assessment tools.

* There was continued growth in cooperative partnerships with developers of specialized online content. For example, Nationalgeographic.com signed a multi-year deal with Encyclopaedia Britannica to add the Britannica Concise Encyclopedia to its Homework Help site, and AOL@School established more than 30 partnerships with companies including Apex Learning, BoxerLearning and Riverdeep.

* Growing numbers of companies committed to delivering …

Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information: Article title: Moving Target: Keeping Up with the Web Gets Harder Every Year. in the Time It Took to Read That Last Sentence, Another 75 Pages Were Put Online. (2003 Curriculum Web Site Awards). Contributors: Dyrli, Odvard Egil - Author. Magazine title: District Administration. Volume: 39. Issue: 2 Publication date: February 2003. Page number: 38+. © 2007 Professional Media Group LLC. COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group.

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