Some Web sites even offer electronic forms with questions to which students can respond—in either a multiple choice or an essay format. Andy Carvin, a specialist in educational technology with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, praises the World Wide Web as “an excellent tool in which to design online curricula.” Understandably, even elementary schools are getting on the Web with their own areas. Other good things are happening. By way of a project called Big Sky Telegraph, Native Americans in Montana have been pen pals with children in the former Soviet Union. What better way to stir up an interest in writing, politics, and geography at the same time? Significantly, in Montana and other places, many schools are not on the Net directly. Instead, schools use affordable bulletin board systems—their own or perhaps those operated by hobbyists—which can relay Net-originated material. If need be, such systems can run on ancient computers of the kind found at garage sales; some messages may be delayed for days, but that’s better than no connection at all. Within the BBS world, moreover, nets even exist especially for education. Consider K12Net, which includes at least “three dozen conferences specifically related to K-12 curriculum” and reaches some sixty school-associated systems in New Zealand alone. More and more, however, lucky schools are hooking into the Internet directly or at least arranging for teachers and students to get accounts elsewhere. As a ninth grader at Poolesville Middle Senior High School, in Poolesville, Maryland, Chris Gazunis used the Net to study catastrophes such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and oil spills. “We didn’t just look at a textbook diagram of what caused an earthquake and the casualty number associated with it,” he recalled. “We used the networks to learn what happened to the people’s lives and homes. Instead of just being given a set of directions and material that would result in an earthquake resistant building, we designed and tested them ourselves.”[5.3] Randy Hammer, a high schooler at Timberline High School in Lacey, Washington, who is blind “with two glass eyes,” once had to have sighted people read the newspaper to him. No longer. Via network connections, he can enjoy the _Washington Post_, the _Moscow News_, and science-oriented publications—thanks to a gadget that reads aloud to him the words on his screen. “It’s hard now,” he wrote, “to remember how I lived without this wealth of materials and information at my fingertips.”[5.4] That’s what happens when the hardware is around.