Hey kid, you’ve got mail!
E-mail that is – if America Online has its way.
Beginning May 17, the country’s largest Internet service provider will offer a free education service to all wired schools – including e-mail, chat rooms and links to on-line learning programs.
AOL@School will have six separate online sites – or portals – tailored for grades K to 2, 3 to 5, middle school, high schools and administrators. The service would start up in September for the next school year.
In order to cover costs for the service, AOL will sell ad space on the sites used by teachers and administrators.
Only “public service announcements” – such as the dangers of drunk driving – will appear on students’ sites, said Mark Nixon, AOL’s executive director of education.
“We’re trying to make the Internet more user friendly for the classroom,” Nixon said during a Post presentation at the School Tech Exposition & Conference at the Hilton hotel yesterday.
Like its regular Internet service for customers, each student will get a screen name. Each school will also be given a security number as well as a password to safeguard privacy, Nixon said.
The Board of Education last month proposed hooking up with an Internet company to provide its 1.1 million students and 150,000 staffers with e-mail and educational instruction.
But a member of the board’s cyberspace task force had a wait-and-see attitude toward the AOL plan.
“We’d like to see it up and running for a while,” said Brian Morrow, superintendent of District 6 covering Washington Heights and Inwood.
City teachers and Internet experts applauded AOL’s classroom effort.
“Free service through AOL would be useful to have. A lot of teachers have AOL at home,” noted Minh Rosen, a teacher and technology coordinator at PS 87 on the Upper West Side.
The AOL instructional programs were selected by a panel of educators at the American Association of School Administrators.
AOL’s marketing muscle in cyberspace – it currently has 22 million subscribers – could give it a leg up over Web competitors.