As the Internet enters a stage of explosive growth, many public schools are climbing online. From Dade County, Fla., to the North Star Borough in Fairbanks, Alaska, students and educators are beginning to link the future of their education to that of the rest of the world.

Some of these efforts are tentative, others bold, as schools work with varying levels of resources and expertise. Educators work to develop acceptable use policies that will satisfy school boards and still have relevance to a technology that did not even exist when the '90s began. Meanwhile, the general public reads scary stories about the darker corners of the Internet, and public schools understandably respond with caution. The negative stories make better copy than positive ones, and the images they create tend to linger in people's minds. Will children misuse the Internet? Will adults make inappropriate contact with children?

But many educators clearly think the Internet's benefits to children far outweigh potential drawbacks. The Net is a link to other schools, libraries, and museums and the world at large. With a bewildering array of resources, the question becomes not whether to link up to the Internet, but a series of how-tos. How do you pay for it? How do you determine acceptable use by students? How do you choose the links that students will use?

Fortunately, a great deal of help is available. Public schools that are online readily share links and information, and businesses and universities provide technical savvy that can help make an elementary school's home page look top-notch. Some schools even share their computing resources with schools in neighboring towns.

Still, schools proceed at their own pace. Look at any given academic home page and you may very well find a yellow road sign with a construction worker symbol and a notice that the site is under construction. This does not mean, of course, that you cannot already find valuable material on that site. Virtually all of the sites are works in progress, and some are clearly gems in the making--in Cottage Grove, Minn., for example.

The University of Minnesota has taken a lead in providing assistance to public schools that want to go online. With financial backing from the 3M Company, the University of Minnesota College of Education has helped organize a pilot project with the Hillside Elementary School in Cottage Grove. They have two goals: to incorporate the Internet's resources into elementary schools and to allow children to create Internet resources that others may use.

Organizers called the Hillside project extremely successful, and no wonder. Mrs. Collins' sixth graders used the Internet to produce research papers on such topics as Antarctica and the Shoemaker-Levy comet. They conducted career interviews, studied the wind, wrote stories, and created home pages. Just a few of the skills they developed included conducting research and creating HTML documents.

The organizers plan to spend the summer documenting their actions so that others may follow their example. Meanwhile, as children enjoy their summer, teachers are taking part in summer Internet projects and planning new ones for the fall.

In Fairbanks, North Star's Bill McKee found that training teachers was key to a successful school Internet program. With Internet training, he said, "ninety percent of the teachers have said their computer skills have increased considerably." Teachers and students have increased their learning curves, said McKee, who added that he loved when their eyes light up as if to say, "I got it!"

As teachers improved their own Internet skills, students quickly got past the computer-as-Nintendo stage and began creating home pages and conducting their own searches. Soon, fifth graders were teaching second graders how to search for animal pictures and create links from their stories to the pictures. Sixth graders helped first graders write and illustrate stories. (The phenomenon of children teaching other children was part of the Minnesota experience, as well.) Teachers began helping each other with hardware and software problems, without always going to the school's technical specialists.

The Alaskan students also are eager to tell the world about their culture and environment. At the nearby North Pole Middle School home page, you can "experience life in the Final Frontier," with student tales of snow machining, bear wrestling, and snowboarding polar bears.

The North Star page contains links to eight local schools. You can, for example, listen to children from University Park Elementary School in Fairbanks deliver greetings in seven different languages, including Yu'pik. About two dozen student home pages reflect the influence of the local environment, with topics such as ice art, dog mushing, and how to keep busy when outdoor temperatures are 40 degrees below zero.

Learning has not been restricted to regular class hours. Classes after school and on Saturdays provide further opportunities for teachers and students to learn Internet basics. McKee provides teachers with written guidelines to help them improve their skills during the summer when they have more time to explore the Net.

Occasionally, the steps taken by schools are so cautious that the Internet appears to be forbidden (or forbidding) to children. After presenting an attractive photo of two elementary school children, one home page never mentions students at all. The focus is entirely on buildings and adults, relating who the school was named after and who the first principal was in 1922 and when he retired.

But reluctance to focus on the children is the exception. Many schools publish lists of hot sites, cool links, and fun places to visit in cyberspace. School sites such as those in Miami become links to the rest of the world, often reflecting the unique personal tastes of adults and children.

Bev Cameron, who teaches computer classes at American High School in Dade County, Fla., guides her advanced students through the Internet using Netscape Navigator and the CU-SeeMe videoconferencing system developed by Cornell University CU-SeeMe.

She says her students quickly learn through trial and error how to focus their searches. Cameron's students have honed their skills in cyberspace scavenger hunts and recently worked on three major multimedia projects: Hurricane Andrew, the Miami Metro Zoo, and the Holocaust.

But Cameron's advanced students have the most fun using CU-SeeMe. "Conferencing with someone from Japan, London, Virginia, Germany, and Barcelona all at the same time was incredible," she said. The students discussed school, exams, weather, music, NBA playoffs, and even Cuban immigration policy with people all over the world. The class acquired a world map with time zones so students could locate the people with whom they were talking. The students thus received a good geography lesson in the bargain.

Cameron reports that students are so enthusiastic they want to use the Internet for special projects in other classes. To this end, Cameron is helping to train a core group of a dozen teachers in various subject areas to help them incorporate the Internet into their lesson plans for the 1995 to 1996 academic year.

And what will the students gain? Cameron hopes they will attain "a more global view of the world beyond boundaries, language, culture, and race." She said the CU-SeeMe experience already has helped with this. "I also hope the students will now think of the Internet as a primary resource for up-to-date information to be used in all their classes," she said.

Dade County's approach also might serve as an example of how to control the material to which students are exposed. Initial student Internet access is through a schoolwide network that requires a teacher to sign on. Cameron makes clear to her students that the school district's code of student conduct applies to the Internet. Just as they may not use profanity or bring sexually explicit materials into school, they may not use the Internet for these purposes.

Cameron allows no more than two computers online at any time so she can properly monitor students' activities. The students have neither time nor opportunity to browse randomly, as time and access to the Internet are limited. Students also have specific assignments to perform, and they are asked to log their site visitations. Access to Usenet newsgroups is restricted solely to educational groups. Meanwhile, Cameron is helping to forge an acceptable use policy for submission to the local school board.

One common thread among the schools discussed in this article is that they all have had outside help. If you want to know how to put your school on the Internet, plenty of information is available, beginning with Wentworth Worldwide Media's Classroom Connect. It offers lesson plans, pointers to libraries and museums, and other resource aids.

NASA sponsors a number of K-12 Internet initiatives within its Quest (or gopher to quest.arc.nasa.gov) program, including its Getting U.S. Teachers Online project.

If you consider the Internet an electronic highway, then Web66 makes sense. "Just as U.S. Highway Route 66 was a catalyst for Americana," says the Web66 home page, "we see the World-Wide Web as a catalyst that will integrate the Internet into K-12 school curricula." One of a number of pioneering efforts by the University of Minnesota, Web66 is an outgrowth of the Hillside project. Its aims are to help public school educators learn how to set up their own servers and to help educators find appropriate resources on the Web. The Web66 Registry maintains links to a growing number of schools across the United States plus 26 other countries.

Students and their parents might also check out Cyber High School, which offers "a complete curriculum and instruction." Beginning with the initial term in the fall, students will participate in class discussions using e-mail, IRC, and talk. The founders, John DeGrazia-Sanders and D. Geoffrey Foley, describe themselves as career teachers and administrators. You can find out more on their home page, by checking their FAQ.

As DeGrazia-Sanders and Foley point out, not every student has the discipline for independent work. However, Cyber High has put together a superb set of links that include literature, reference works, presidential libraries beginning with Herbert Hoover's, public laws, and more.

The arrival of the World-Wide Web has posed a challenge for educational planners. Tom Layton of South Eugene, Ore., has helped write two technology plans for his high school. The most recent, written two years ago, never mentioned the Internet. Today, he said, accessing the Internet was the second-most-popular technology-based activity at the school after word processing. "I guess I have given up planning," he said. "It takes an enormous amount of time for a lot of people and the results seem too short-lived to justify the effort. All I'm trying to do now is grab the tiger's tail and hang on for dear life."