No classrooms anymore? The net school provides teaching lessons for pupils and teachers.

Claudia Wessling

Computer and internet access for all Berlin schools - it's only a question of time to come true. But teachers ask themself how to use the new expensive technique. The biggest problem: the need for content.

Teaching software of school book publishers are a big cost factor of the school's budget and only teaching functions of a word processing program is not enough to justify such big investments. Two Berliners found the solution and opened the "OpenWebSchool" in the internet. "I had the idea for an internet school during my daily teaching units", said Hans-Peter Prenzel, teacher for work science at Grundschule am Rüdesheimer Platz. He wanted to use the school's computers for his lessons. While he was browsing the net, he found a US website called "WWW Assign". It's a portal with practise units for schools and universities. Together with the software programmer Wilfried Römer they began to construct the page. Since september the "OpenWebSchool" is online. Until now you can find lessons for the classical subjects like German, English and Mathematics.

You can calculate an easy exercise, do a completion test, learn the comma rules and convert different currencies. "Our project can be used by teachers during lessons as well as by pupils from home", said Hans-Peter Prenzel. The net school can be accessed with every internet browser and runs on every PC, also on Macintosh and Linux. Who wants to save telephone costs can download the complete site to work offline. During the last 3 months the page visits have grown by the factor 3. With a new design the developers want to address more people: The text based part is going to get bigger and more multimedial elements are going to be used: "There could be some music tracks for processing put into the net for music lessons", said Hans-Peter Prenzel. Furthermore a painting program is going to be added as well. Pupils will be able to create pictures directly through the net. Prenzel and his fellow are not able to do the whole work alone: "We need teachers, who give us some content."

Later there should be units for all subjects and class levels avaible. So teachers and pupils can make suggestions for the "OpenWebSchool".