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| Greene County gained access to the internet in 1994 when an internet connection was established in each school's library. Librarians were trained on the use of the internet and given accounts through Pellissippi Community College in Knoxville, Tennessee. These accounts were later moved to the TEN-NASH server in Nashville. | ||
| Teachers began to explore this new technology called the Internet and gained his/her own Internet account by attending training through the State Department of Education. They began exploring the many educational opportunities on the Internet, especially EMAIL and the World Wide Web. At this time only text-based capabilities existed for our teachers. Netscape was unheard of and a program called Lynx was used to browse in a text-only mode. | ||
| During the 95-96 school year our
school system experimented with a new Internet project. In this project
a webmaster was selected at each of our schools and was given the chance
to explore the Internet through a graphical interface that allowed graphics
and sound. The selected webmaster at each school began to build webpages
to be placed on the World Wide Web. Free graphical accounts to the Internet
and free webspace on the World Wide Web to publish the webpages of each
school was first provided by ILINK, a local Internet provider. Later
accounts were provided by Greene County Online, the current provider that
still offers free accounts to each school and provides the webpspace for
our schools to publish our current school webpages. To explore our webpages
at each of the individual schools use the following URL:
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| The next major step to Internet
and networking capabilities came with the completion of the state department's
ConnecTEN project. It has allowed us to make advancements in technology
like never before. Routers were placed in each of our schools and ISDN
lines were installed. This allowed each school a higher speed and
more economical connection to the Internet than modems would have ever
been able to do.
All of our schools were then wired to allow a schoolwide LAN to exist and to allow each classroom and administrative office to be connected to the Internet. The goal was for every classroom to have at least one data jack in the classroom (most have two) which allowed one or many computers in that classroom to be connected to the Internet. Many of these schools were wired by volunteer effort in a project known as "Net Weekend" during the 97-98 school year. This project took place in seven of our fifteen schools and was very successful. Volunteers from the staff and the school's community worked together to lend a hand and together with the help of the technology team of our school system were able to put in place the infrastructure needed for their school to enter the 21st century networked and ready to communicate across the Internet. |
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| The focus of the 98-99 school year
was getting all computers in each school that were capable of accessing
the Internet "online". That involved installing the proper hardware,
software, configuring the hardware and software, and training personnel.
Student access to the Internet has always been strictly supervised, but in 1998 Internet filtering of undesirable web sites was put in place by the state department, so students and teachers could explore Internet with an added safety feature. By the turn of the century some of our schools already had over one hundred computers online and that could access the Internet. Teachers also began to explore creating webpages at the classroom level and each school learned how to set up its own webserver online by the end of the school year. Many new webservers were placed online to be accessed by faculty, staff, parents, and others in the community to gain and distribute information about schools and the classrooms inside those schools. |
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