s Director of the Virtual High School™ I recently sent an e-mail to all of the participating teachers asking if they wished to continue in the following year. The message I heard back was loud and clear-Yes!

Here's a sampling of their responses:

Many classes are being highlighted by the news media. After seeing an article about VHS in a California paper, the Public Broadcasing Service "Imagine II Series" spent a day at Miramonte High School in California filming a segment for release this fall (see photo to left). The San Jose Mercury News ran a long story that was picked up by the Knight-Ridder news wire. The resulting front page coverage in the Atlanta Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Denver Post, to name a few, was exciting. Now the cable Sci-Fi Channel is filming segments on VHS in North Carolina and California for a piece on their weekly news magazine "The New Edge." The New York PBS outlet will film a one hour segment for the weekly "Telecommunications & Information Revolution" series. And the California Teachers Magazine-circulation 300,000-is working on a lead article about VHS.

All this even before school opened! We continue to get calls from television, radio and print media weekly. Obviously VHS has caught the imagination of many people. There are now over 500 students enrolled in the Fall term. The average class size is eighteen. The average number of schools represented per class is ten. The average number of states represented per class is six. Students from Alaska, California, and the country of Jordan are conversing with students from Colorado, New Mexico, and North Carolina, as well as a Department of Defense Dependents School in Germany. A teacher in Massachusetts is instructing students in Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Washington. From Las Lomas to La Junta, Collingswood to Keystone Oaks, Soldotna to Algonquin, students are learning and communicating with each other online.

"Hi everybody! Is it just me or is this the most fun we've had in a long time," one student wrote to his fellow classmates.

I want to also recognize another powerful collaboration that has happened "behind the scenes" between businees, and the private and public sectors. Every week the programmers at Lotus Development Corporation have listened to reports from our pioneering teachers and the Concord Consortium team about LearningSpace, the program that supports VHS. Lotus has taken our input seriously and repeatedly come up with changes and improvements-sometimes overnight.

Now Lotus has agreed to further support the VHS program. With an influx of over 500 students "hitting" on the VHS server, we needed some heavy server support. Lotus has offered us an Interliant "server farm" in Texas, which means around the clock support and monitoring to prevent "crashes." To our knowledge Interliant is the biggest and best Lotus Notes support company in the world. This generous gesture allows for greater potential success in the present as well as the future. While presently a research and development project, VHS aims to support schools all over the world in the years ahead. VHS can become a bridge between schools of all sizes, in states and counties with varying resources-an educational opportunity never before imagined.

In the coming months we will all learn what works in the netcourse environment-and what needs fine tuning. For now, let me update a phrase first used by Carla Melucci, VHS Program Coordinator-The Future Is Here!

(l. to r.) VHS Director Bruce Droste, U.S. Representative Marty Meehan, Secretary of Education Richard Riley, and Hudson Pulic Schools Superintendent Sheldon Berman at Washington D.C. meeting in the Rayburn Office Building.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
R & D Effort :: Masthead :: Cool Reviews :: Famine to Feast ::
The Jungle Story :: INTEC Reviews :: Professional Development ::
New Programs :: LearningSpace :: Perspective :: Get Involved! ::

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