More Information About the Global School District

The Global School District is the future of education. The Global School District is a new service from The Academy of Applied Science that will connect high schools across the country together through the internet. It's a complete distance learning solution that provides unique learning opportunities by harnessing the power and flexibility of the internet.

The Global School District will improve education by expediating the channels of communication thus making them easily available to students and teachers. In other words, it will make it much easier for everybody to communicate with everybody else. Our goal is that this will provide a tremendous benefit to education:

By creating a formal means of networking and communication between high schools
By providing high-quality education in subjects that may not be available in every school
By giving students easy access to leaders, mentors, and peers in their fields of interest
By motivating and allowing students to look beyond what is offered at their own school
By developing teamwork skills

We heavily emphasize a course structure that allows students to interact with one another and work together on projects and assignments. We are developing "virtual laboratories" in which students can work in teams to solve problems.

We also are truly interested in a global reach. Schools in Malaysia, Bangladesh and South Africa will be connected by the beginning of the 1997-1998 school year, with many more countries to follow. This offers developing countries a chance at tapping into an american education, as well as offering american students a chance to interact with students from other countries and cultures. Why read a chapter on apart hied when you can ask a student in South Africa what it means to him or her?

Our Resources

Our first important resource is our software. Our software is a powerful communications package that combines a lot of common but disparate methods of communication into one very easy to use program. Unlike similar commercial communication products, our software is custom tailored toward distance learning and it is made with our goals in mind. And as the icing on the cake, our software is provided entirely free.

Another very important resource is our network of high schools. The Academy of Applied Science has developed a network of over 3500 high school teachers in all 50 states through the Junior Science and Humanities Symposia (JSHS). We are leveraging this existing network of JSHS teachers to create a global network of high school teachers and students. This provides an initial user base which is extremely important in a system whose thrust is the interaction between users.

Because interaction between users is so important, our most important resource is obviously our people...

Our People

In addition to the people in the high schools associated with The Academy of Applied Science, we are always looking for prospective students and teachers who want to be part of the future of education. If you are interested in becoming part of the future of education, here's how you can contribute.

We are in the process of bringing several other places on board in addition to the high schools under the Academy of Applied Science. We will be adding these organizations to our list of resources as each relationship solidifies.

One organization that is already working closely with us is the Liberty Science Center. The Liberty Science Center is working closely with us to link schools across the globe together with science museums for a totally new type of interactive science learning.

Located in Liberty State Park, New Jersey, the Liberty Science Center is one of the world's leading interactive science museums. Unlike most museums, all of the content in the science center is designed to be touched and explored. Because of this approach, WNET (a public access television station with nationally acclaimed science programming such as NOVA) has chosen the Liberty Science Center as the interactive component for their programming. The Global School District will allow students across the world to interact with the exhibits and the visitors of the science center. Many of the exhibits (including the WNET ones) will directly incorporate the participation of Global School District users.