A Regional Knowledge-Building ICT Educational Community

For the past seven years (since the 1999 school year), a program called Haifa-Net has been in place in schools throughout the city of Haifa. In the framework of the program, some 60 school websites and some 150 ICT (Information and Communication Technology) environments learning were constructed. Each such learning environment constitutes a website, or part of a website, that contains academic material from a certain field of knowledge or addresses some interdisciplinary academic subject. The subjects for the ICT learning environments were selected from the schools' areas of interest and needs, and thus, relevant and significant learning was enabled for the learners. The main thesis offered by this study, in light of the data analysis, is that regional ICT knowledge-building communities, that include dozens of schools, can be established through cooperative work which develops ICT learning products using available means that exists in every school in every region.