Please see current Living Schoolbook Project

The Living Schoolbook: Project Overview

Advanced Information Systems The Living Schoolbook creates a unique learning environment enabling teachers and students to use multimedia-on-demand, supercomputers, parallel databases, and networking as educational resources. Three educational software applications have been developed using these technologies and are being made available to six schools across New York State:
--an interactive journey of New York State,
--video-on-demand for the classroom, and
-- a digital library of Internet resources designed for kids.

Digital Libraries Kid's Web is a World Wide Web digital library for school kids, that is being developed as part of the Living Schoolbook. The project is the result of a "data mine" of the World Wide Web of resources to create a "Cached Internet" of resources (locally stored at NPAC) to support focused teacher selection of material and high performance delivery over NYNET. Selection of the material is conducted by teacher teams to provide high-value materials, efficiency in teacher preparation time and a focus on K-12 appropriate material. Plans are to implement searches that are supported by knowledge agents from a variety of sources. Selected Kid's Web material can also be made available by CD ROM to school sites with poor Internet access.

Impact on Learning The promise of a future National Information Infrastructure delivering high bandwidth to the classroom offers new opportunities for educational reform. The primary directive of the Living Schoolbook Project is to support new models of learning. The base technologies are available, but many obstacles to applying advanced information technologies in K-12 schools must be overcome. Through the effort of NPAC and our InfoMall project partners (NYNEX, Rome Laboratory, and several information content providers) we have made great strides in bringing options for educational reform closer to reality.

Summary

• Motivation: The National Information Infrastructure (NII) will soon evolve to link schools, homes, offices, hospitals, and government agencies with high-speed digital networks supporting real-time video for interactive collaboration and data access.
  
  
• Use of technology in education has had modest success. K-12 schools lack an adequate technology infrastructure, and currently there is little understanding if and how the NII can be used in education.
  
  
• The Internet provides an exemplar of the broad capabilities of the future NII. NYNET with its massively parallel processor (MPP) servers provides a prototype of NII technologies.
  
  
• The Living Schoolbook combines Computational Scientists with professionals in the Syracuse University School of Education and Newhouse School of Public Communication.
  
  
• The Living Schoolbook project is a New York State funded initiative to create innovative educational applications that exploit leading information technologies.
  
  
• InfoMall and Living Educational Applications:
  -- Interactive Multimedia Geographic Information System--Virtual Field Trip
  -- Video on Demand
  -- Cached Internet Resources
  -- Telecollaboration in the classroom
  -- Realistic (HPCC) Simulations on demand.
• The Living Schoolbook project requires state of the art information technologies:
  -- Terabyte databases
  -- Parallel supercomputers
  -- Interactive Multimedia
  -- High-speed wide area networks
  
  
  

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