Kathy Schrock's Home Page - History of the Sites

History of the Schrock Sites

1992: Kathy receives an Internet account from the state department of education. She does not know anything about the Internet, nor about how to hook up to it, and is confused when the directions mention TELNET and "winsock.dll".

1993: Kathy hooks up a 2400 baud modem to an IBM 5155 Transportable computer, and, using her state-funded Internet account (MEOL), and via the Lynx text browser, begins to identify Gopher links that would be usable to her teachers, joting them down on the back of discarded library cards. She files them in a file box by broad subject areas and shares the information with the teachers in her middle school, where she is the library media specialist.

1994: Kathy continues to expand her knowledge of the other protocols available on the Internet by using Harley Hahn and Rick Stout's book "The Internet Complete Reference." In addition, she begins to notice a new list of severs, under the heading "World Wide Web" in the text browser. She investigates some of the sites, and also notices the tag <IMAGE> sprinkled throughout the text.

1994: Kathy goes to a state-run workshop and sees the graphical Web interface, Mosaic, for the first time. Clutching her little file box of 400 cards, she wonders how long it is going to be until Cape Cod has dial-up access to the graphical Web that is not a toll call.

1995: Cape Internet opens on Cape Cod, with graphical access to the Web finally available! The owner of the company knows about Kathy's box of cards, and tells her, if she learns HTML, he will host the Web site for free. Kathy studies Laura Lemay's books "Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in a Week" and "Teach Yourself More Web Publishing with HTML in a Week" and Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators is launched on June 1, 1995.

1995-1999: As the Web explodes and materials to support teaching and learning continue to become available, Kathy refines and reworks the site, adding additional categories of sites that are useful for educators. She begins to think about the criteria involved in selecting sites, and turns that into a series of critical evaluation guides for teachers and students to use when considering the use of Web sites to support their research. In addtion, Kathy creates a site for her hometown, her favorite basketball player, and her favorite movie.

1999: DiscoverySchool, a subsidiary of Discovery Communications, approaches Kathy about partnering with them. They already have a suite of tools for teachers as well as online lesson plans supporting their programming. However, they want to add a list of categorized links, and Kathy decides to join them. At first, the teachers using Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators, many of who are still using dial-up, complain about the increased load-time of the pages on the Discovery site. However, once it became clear that the robustness of the server is more dependable, and as users began to get faster modems and broadband, the complaints subsided.

1999 to present: Kathy starts sending out a "Site of the School Day", and later, "Site of the School Week" via a listserv. These sites include items of a timely nature, as well as things that do not quite meet the criteria for inclusion in Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators but are still interesting topics for teachers.

2000 to present: Kathy continues to add sites of interest to the subject categories, but rounds out the information on the site with inclusion of PDF and HTML versions of her presentations and other items of professional interest to teachers.

2003: Kathy finally creates her own homepage where she can post additional items of interest for teachers. She often links to this personal home page from the Schrockguide.

2006: Kathy begins to explore other avenues of providing and gathering information from educators. She creates her blog "Kathy Schrock's Kaffeeklatsch" to post additional items of interest to educators in a more informal setting.

1999 to present: As newer technologies become available, Kathy is always trying out techno-gadgets to help teachers see how they can be used to support teaching and learning. Sometimes called the "Gadget Geek", Kathy shares this information with others through presentations, and later through the blog.

2007: As Second Life becomes more mainstream, Kathy (Kathy Dryburgh SL) becomes heavily involved with the venue. She spearheads the initiative for four school districts to purchase an island, Lighthouse Learning Island, where they are conducting real-life professional development for their teachers. The hope is to use islands on the Teen Grid to work with middle and high school students within Second Life next school year.

Discovery Communications revamps DiscoverySchool and puts it under the umbrella of DiscoveryEducation. Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators changes its interface a bit, but a sophisticated search tool now allows users another way to access information on the Schrockguide.