Contents

Overview

 Activities in 100-school project have been voluntary by the members basis, and no activities which the project administration proposed have been made compulsory. Various ideas from member schools have been refined and put into practice. These activities are conveniently called "the voluntary projects".

On the other hand, there were many schools which had no experience of the Internet before 100-school project. To help them get started, the administration proposed plans, invited the members to join the plans, and made necessary preparations for them to carry on with the plans. We call this type of activities "the regular projects".

To support the members to use the Internet better, we have set up several mailing lists, opened a technical help line, held study sessions.

Conferences and symposia have been held to introduce the educational use of network to those who are inside and outside 100-school project.

The activities of the project to this day may be summarized as shown below;-
in 1995 school year, the main stream of the activities were experiments of network use in education at the member schools, and
in 1996 school year, based on the experiences, the activities began to be after the great educational gains, and the gains have been demonstrated to the local governments, education committees, schools outside 100-school project, and overseas communities.

Voluntary Projects

The voluntary projects were led by volunteering member schools and their subject matters were invariably educational usage of network. The projects adopted a variety of ways to make use of network. There are many practical plans of interest.

These can be classified as shown below.

Regular Projects

 The regular projects are plans outlined by the project administration to promote activities using network in education. Various plans which made use of the characteristics of network (prompt, vast, mutual), were carried out.

Researchers specialized in network use in education and participants (non member school's participation was invited through the Internet) materialized the plans in detail and put them into practice. Efforts were made to pick up subjects suited to be parts of curricula.

The project administration made out a draft based on proposals presented by both the researchers and the member schools. Then detailed themes are chosen.

System Operation Support

The project administration has given various support to help the member schools with their activities.

mailing lists, news groups

The administration put below listed mailing lists and news groups into work in sequence since April 1995. These were prepared to help the members with operation of the network at their site, and for communication on business affairs between the administration and the members, also for information exchanges among the members.

technical help desk

To help the members with network related problems and other technical problems, a technical help desk was opened on October 26, 1995, and technical support has been provided for.
Requests for advices were accepted through e-mail, dedicated telephone, and fax. Except for server stoppages, most requests came through e-mail.

There were three major subject matters of the questions. The first was hardware and software problems, the second networking environment expansion, and the third hardware and software usage.

Since advisers were knowledgeable about hardware installed and the manner the sites connected to the Internet in 100-school project, and were also capable of remotely diagnosing the servers at the schools, advises fit to the cases were possible, especially for hardware and software problems.

Questions of universality were stored in FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions).

study sessions

In February 1996, a three days course of technical study sessions was held for the network administrators of the member schools.

32 administrators from 30 schools participated. Each school was provided with the same type of server machine as the one in the respective school. The sessions were on lecture and practice (on the machine) basis, and items listed below were covered.

basic operations
X Window, shell, commands
file system
set up a file, contents of a file, copy, rename, and move a file, find a file, regular expressions, store command results in a file, editor
user administration
add & delete an account, set user environment
network environment set up
name server, mail server, http server, and anonymous FTP server set up
command necessary to system administrators
uuencode/uudecode, compress/gzip, tar, df/du, cron
mailing list
majordomo
questionnaires on web
cgi-bin

Conferences and Symposia

 At the end of each school year 1995 and 1996, an annual conference was held to give opportunities to demonstrate and report the results of 100-school project and of individual schools. Participants numbered hundreds.
Smaller scaled symposia of specific localities or school types were more frequently held. There were 10 occasions of such symposia in 1995, and 6 in 1996.
For more details, a page has been prepared. Please have a look.

Publications

 News letters to notify the persons in charge at the members, explanatory references to explain hardware and Internet usage to teachers who are not limited to the members, and pamphlets to make people in general aware of 100-school project have been published and distributed.

For more details, a page has been prepared. Please have a look.