Schoolnet Japan is an organization of educators who are interested in the development and utilization of the Internet in primary and secondary education. Its Japanese name is "Tokai Schoolnet Kenkyukai." Since its establishment in December,1994, this organization has initiated mailing lists among members to share information, technical support, and planning of activities, and bi-monthly off-line meetings such as lectures, workshops and special events.

As a part of the konet international exchange project which is now active, Japanese and foregin schools cooperate the environmental research for NOx density. This means that to have international exchange between Japanese and foregin schools (especially in the U.S.A.) more activate. And based upon the result of the research in the global environment project which was done in the last year, this project helps students'understandings for environmental issues and energy consumption, and provides an opportunity to have a worldwide outlook through the international exchange between schools.

MediaKids is an educational project to facilitate children's inter-school communication via computer network. The majority of participants are students of elementary schools, junior high schools, high schools and alternative and special education programs in Japan. The project is conducted by GLOCOM and other supporting organizations. We expect children to play a central role in this project. MediaKids started in fall of 1994, and in September of 1996 "MediaKids Consortium" was organized. Through this project, GLOCOM aims to establish and develop a children's community network, and to bring together more schools and supporting organizations.

Servers and client computers, which are installed at about 100 elementary, junior high and senior high schools throughout Japan, are connected to the Internet in order to provide an environment that permits joint classroom exercises, information exchange and network conferencing through use of the network. The software is also provided for enabling students to access and send their information to libraries and schools throughout the world. Voluntary activities planned by each member school using the provided environment are supported and the common use plans established by the secretariat are being promoted in order to test the education and study beyond restrictions of the classroom and to verify the results obtained.

GeoTouch" is a world-wide environmental education project that commenced on April 22 commemorating "Earth Day". The first session of the project was conducted from April 22 to June 22. There were 13 schools in Japan and 40 schools from 7 different countries involved in the first session for a total of 5,000 students. Students examined and analyzed their local environment and shared the results over the Internet. In addition, participants were grouped according to similarities in environmental problems of their particular regions so they could compare, contrast and analyze environmental problems.

http://www.kids-commons.net/geotouch/GeoTouch.html