Importance of Information Technology

How did information technology make this application possible? Describe any new technologies used and/or cite innovative uses of existing technology. For example, did you adapt an old software program to solve a new problem? Or did you define a problem and develop new technology to solve it?

Information technology and the advances made from 1993 to the present have unified the participants in STEP. Lessons and hands-on practice during that first summer began with the introduction to electronic mail, using elm, and ftp and gopher, for communcations and information retrieval on the Internet through computer accounts graciously donated by UCSD and CERFnet. Teachers were also given an overview of how programming languages work and the MATLAB computational environment.

NCSA Mosaic was demostrated to the participants on February 5, 1994, and a new era in Information Technology began. The impact of the World Wide Web on STEP grew over time and in 1996 has become the main tool for information sharing. Don Anderson began developing materials for using Web browsers, HTML, and helper applications such as NIH Image or spreadsheets, to present classroom lessons on stand-alone computers. The key here was taking advantage of Web technologies without an Internet connection. Extensive instructions for doing this are at the STEP home page:

Don Anderson's UCSD page hosted STEP teachers SC95 pages
http://www-step.ucsd.edu/s95 Using Web Browsers on Stand-Alone Machines for Class Lessons

STEP teachers now use the Web browsers to give presentations of their work to their peers, as well as guide student explorations in the classroom.