Honey 95-54327 Union City On-Line is a unique partnership among the Education Development Center's Center for Children and Technology, the Union City New Jersey Board of Education, New Jersey State Systemic Initiative and the associated Networking Infrastructure for Education Testbed, Bell Atlantic, Lotus Development Corporation, ISDN Systems Corporation, and ARC Consulting. The objective of this project is to develop highly sophisticated networking resources dedicated specifically to furthering the goals of the District's systemic educational reforms. Anticipated outcomes include: producing extensive knowledge about effective architectures for high-speed networking in schools. creating disseminable training applications to support teachers in integrating Internet resources into the curriculum, and to introduce them to authoring techniques and design principles for building original World Wide Web resources. developing disseminable on-line applications to support three key themes of educational reform: student-driven inquiry, portfolio assessment and parental involvement. creating a model for community authoring initiatives that bring together teachers, students and parents to create World Wide Web resources. demonstrating the transfer of technical and design expertise from corporate and non-profit collaborators to the local community. providing opportunities for the extensive dissemination of project outcomes by the school community and by project collaborators, at state and national levels. Achieving these objectives involves two central tasks: first, developing a technical infrastructure that demonstrates a novel approach to creating an affordable, scaleable, and potentially ubiquitous district-wide networking architecture; and second, developing the necessary human infrastructure by creating: Novel and scaleable approaches to teacher training and ongoing staff development. A core set of applications that support district-wide reform efforts. Opportunitie s to involve the community, including teachers, parents and students in a wide range of authoring projects. A model for state and national network-based K-12 reform efforts. New Jersey's SSI and associated NIE project are a primary audience for this model. At the conclusion of this three year effort, the project will have ensured the development of technical, training, and design expertise at the local level, so that the project's technical and human infrastructure can be maintained and further developed, and continue to serve as a model to other school districts .
