One obstacle is access to the Internet. There are five machines with network access in the library of the students' middle school, but we were not able to use them until last week. All of the students had to follow district policy and pass a short quiz on appropriate use of the network, as well as have their parents sign Internet permission slips. The director of educational technology, while supportive of our project, is watching us carefully to insure that we stick to policy. In fact, while Dean might have let three students who forgot their permission slips participate in on-line, the high profile of the project convinced him not to do so. The students who were left out had a hard time understanding this decision, but since we are an unofficial test case for Internet access we cannot take many chances.
At the beginning, we lacked the resources to let the students find enough relevant information themselves, so George spent a good deal of time finding relevant images and text to put on each student's resource disk, which will be used when creating pages. However, danger abounds, as we discovered. As George searched for resources on the Internet for the Rain Forest project he came upon an innocuous looking site that turned out to be an "adult adventure" that had unfortunately been entitled "The Rain Forest." This is just what we feared -- fortunately, we were the ones who found it, not the students, but it reminded us that we have to be careful. Of course, there is another nefarious aspect to the net, it is a great way to waste time. However, once the students got onto the net, they were surprisingly focused.
Our most serious problem has been the lack of time. We had a pull-out class that meets once a week on Wednesdays, for two forty-minute sessions. The first session was spent in the school's computer lab, where the students work on their pages. Because the lab was not available to us during the second session, we used the five library computers for on-line research. In addition to the brevity of class time with the students, the class had already been cancelled once due to IGAP testing and a vacation.
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