Mohan Ramamurthy, Robert Wilhelmson, John Kemp, Steve Hall, Mythili Sridhar and William Chapman
Department of Atmospheric Sciences
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
105 S. Gregory Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801
Tel: (217) 333-8650
Fax: (217) 244-4393
e-mail: mohan@uiatma.atmos.uiuc.edu

and

Barry Fishman, Douglas Gordin, Roy Pea, and Louis Gomez
The School of Education and Social Policy
Northwestern University
2115 N. Campus Drive
Evanston, IL 60208

The Learning Through Collaborative Visualization Project (CoVis) is developing an Internet-based Educational Information Server to enhance geosciences education in the K-12 community. The Geosciences Web Server, which will be implemented on the World-Wide Web, will provide access to a wide range of educational resources, including curriculum and activities, supporting content materials, scientific visualization and analysis tools, real time and retrospective weather and climate datasets, a database of example student projects and data gathered by students, and editorially-reviewed student projects, directory services and databases of students, teachers, mentors, and other participants. In addition, the server will contain video answers to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) produced by the Exploratorium at San Francisco. The server will also act as a major dissemination vehicle for CoVis, and will include publications, papers, reports, images, and videoclips to share findings on an ongoing basis with the broader educational and scientific community.

The CoVis Project is working to foster project-based science in classrooms using advanced technology. The Geosciences Web Server will both support and enhance the project's efforts in this area. This will be accomplished in part by tightly integrating separate layers and subject categories on the server so that the interdependence of the information available can be taken advantage of easily. Although the educational and informational material on the server will initially focus on atmospheric science topics, we expect that it will grow to include a broad range of earth science topics with active community participation. Overall, the Geosciences Web Server will be organized to:

1. Identify useful materials and resources and make them available to teachers.
2. Index material by the activities it supports.
3. Provide models of assessment coupled to activities.
4. Provide a forum to promote interaction and collaboration.
5. Provide search engines that help in specification of teaching and learning goals and activities.
6. Provide browsing and authoring facilities for user contributions.
7. Help structure mentoring opportunities and facilitate mentor-student communication.