The Web for Schools project was funded by the

European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the primary Executive (government), executive arm of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with a number of European Commissioner, members of the Commission (directorial system, informall ...

as part of its ESPRIT programme

European Strategic Program on Research in Information Technology European, or Europeans, may refer to: In general * ''European'', an adjective referring to something of, from, or related to Europe ** Ethnic groups in Europe ** Demographics of Europe ** European cuisine, the cuisines of Europe and other Wes ...

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 (last name pronunciation: ajo born 26 January 1947) is a Belgian informatics engineer who proposed the first (pre-www) hypertext system for CERN in 1987 and collaborated with Tim Berners-Lee on the World Wide Web (jointly winni ...

, 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, the HTML markup language, the URL system, and HTTP. He is a professorial research fellow a ...

the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...

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

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

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