The Web for Schools project was funded by the

European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body o ...

as part of its ESPRIT programme

European Strategic Program on Research in Information Technology European Strategic Programme on Research in Information Technology (ESPRIT) was a series of integrated programmes of information technology research and development projects and industrial technology transfer measures. It was a European Union initi ...

and ran from 1996-03-01 to 1998-02-28. It was a transformative project at the basis of the uptake of the World Wide Web in European schools. The initial inspiration came from

Robert Cailliau Robert Cailliau (, born 26 January 1947) is a Belgian informatics engineer, computer scientist and author who proposed the first (pre-www) hypertext system for CERN in 1987 and collaborated with Tim Berners-Lee on the World Wide Web (jointly wi ...

, a Belgian computer scientist who developed together with

Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a profess ...

the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...

. The project trained over 700 school teachers from 170 schools across Europe in basic

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

using a simple text editor, the only affordable web creation tool at that time. Following that, teachers created more than 70 international collaborative educational projects that resulted in an exponential growth in Europe of teacher communities and educational activities using the World Wide Web.

References

{{reflist Academic computer network organizations Education in the European Union Information technology organizations based in Europe