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NET Gain No. 6: K-12 Web Sites
(November/December 1996)

There are hundreds of K-12 Web sites in the United States geared toward education--often designed and produced by students, teachers or school staff. And because the Web is not managed by one company or organization, these Web sites can pop up overnight virtually unnoticed. This installment of NET Gain begins with ways to find these educational sites and closes with an invitation to help build a valuable electronic resource.

Geographical directories

Web66's International Registry of K-12 Schools located at http://web66.coled.umn.edu/schools.html lists 55 countries with school Web sites. For school Web sites in the United States see http://web66.coled.umn.edu/schools/US/USA.html. Each state listing is subdivided into elementary schools, secondary schools, school districts, educational organizations and resources.

Infoseek at http://www.infoseek.com/ also has geographical listings of schools, but you must follow a few levels of "Related Topics" links to reach a specific site. (For example, "education" to "K-12" to "high schools & secondary schools" to "high schools in North America" to "high schools in the U.S.") If you're looking for a particular school, you can use Infoseek's keyword searching facility to find it.

Yahoo! has an alphabetical listing of U.S. high schools (not subdivided by state) that contains 942 items. You'll find it at http://www.yahoo.com/Regional/Countries/United_States/Education/K_12/High_Schools/

Topical directories and free text searches

A source of frustration for some Techniques readers using geographical listings may be that there is no easy way to find the schools with vocational programs. The vocational schools directory at Yahoo! is http://www.yahoo.com/Education/Career_and_Vocational/. However, the 125-item listing mixes secondary, postsecondary, public and private institutions and may not include vocational components of programs at comprehensive schools.

The strength of services like Infoseek and Yahoo! is their ability to retrieve items based on free text searches. So if you're looking for information on a particular area (the narrower the better in most cases) you are likely to find it. For example, an Infoseek search for "biotechnology high school" retrieves as its first item "The Subarctic Biotech Web Page" at http://www2.northstar.k12.ak.us/schools/wvh2/biotech.home.html, produced by biotech students at West Valley High School in Fairbanks, Alaska!

What we need is a topical directory of K-12 vocational programs, and there doesn't seem to be one. What can we do about it?

Calling all vocational K-12 sites!

If you know of a K-12 Web site that has information about its vocational projects or programs, send the URL to David Carlson at NCRVE (dcarlson@uclink.berkeley.edu). Let's compile the links into a showcase of vocational educators and their students who are leaders in education technology.

NET Gain is compiled by David Carlson (NCRVE, University of California at Berkeley), Peter Seidman (NCRVE), and Judy Wagner (ERIC/ACVE, Ohio State University). An online version of this column will be available on the NCRVE World Wide Web server (http://ncrve.berkeley.edu/NetGain/). Readers are encouraged to let the authors know about any changes in the resources listed, as well as about other resources they find useful.

David Carlson: 800-(old phone deleted);
Peter Seidman: 800-(old phone deleted);
Judy Wagner: 800-848-4815; wagner.6@osu.edu

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