The Southeastern Utah Education Service Center (SESC) in Price, Utah is the lead agency for the State of Utah Resources Web (SURWEB), an innovative technology project that promotes educational improvement through the integration of Internet-based curriculum resources.  SESC is a regional state agency that serves school districts in four rural counties in southeastern Utah.  The SURWEB concept grew out of state and regional technology planning for educational technology and was initiated in Fall 1995 with funding from the Technology Innovation Challenge Grant program of the U.S. Department of Education, Educational Technology Office.  In its fifth year, SURWEB has grown its user base to include teachers and students from around the world.

SURWEB is a testbed that demonstrates the potential of digital, networked multimedia to enhance learning through knowledge creation and related pedagogies. The project offers a diverse range of Web-based tools and processes located at www.surweb.org.  Because of its versatility and accessibility, SURWEB could be described as the “Swiss Army knife” of Internet-based educational applications. 

At its most basic, it is an Internet-based tool that supplements and enhances existing curriculum resources. Its multimedia resources offer learners a presentation building tool and a dynamic digital archive of images, moving images and sound. Teachers and students use the SURWEB archive to research topics and to build classroom presentations called “Media Shows.”  More sophisticated users create and upload their own original multimedia materials.  They can also use SURWEB to link to multimedia files from their research of the World Wide Web. 

Teachers are able to extend their Media Shows by linking standards, goals and assessments to create “Learning Segments” for students.  At its most sophisticated, SURWEB enables users to create their own multimedia knowledge products, demonstrate learning, enhance presentations, take advantage of multiple literacies and multiple ways of learning, and to align standards, tasks and assessments that take full advantage of digital multimedia.  

Originally conceived in 1995 as a database for virtual field trips that showcases the unique assets of the state of Utah, SURWEB has grown from an emphasis on the humanities into a growing database of classroom resources offering diverse content in many disciplines.  SURWEB resources accomplish the following goals to: 1) encourage users to customize classroom resources based on Web-based multimedia source documents through a process called "Building a Media Show"; 2) link standards and assessments with multimedia tasks through the creation of on-line "Learning Segments"; 3) build a virtual archive of customized classroom resources; and 4) encourage the original, hands-on production and wide publishing of Media Shows and Learning Segments that can be used by a broad community of learners. These goals challenge teachers and students to re-think the uses of information for teaching and learning and to construct meaning based on a wider range of multimedia information.

The SURWEB site is a unique resource for teachers and students.  Its use promotes innovative uses of information found on the Internet and encourages technology integration across the K-12 curriculum. Nonetheless, SURWEB is much more than a curriculum development project.  It is also much more than a computer software application.  Its primary goal is to provide a vehicle for school improvement through the use of educational technology.  In addition to content, SURWEB offers state-of-the-art teacher training and other incentives for the effective integration of multimedia in the classroom. 

SURWEB aims to enhance teaching and learning by supporting teachers and their students to: a) access, organize and evaluate information found on the Internet; b) expand literacy practices beyond print through the dynamic uses of sound, video, text and image; c) integrate and simplify the use of new technologies into classroom tasks and assessments across the curriculum; d) promote hands-on, knowledge creation by teachers and students; e) use the Internet to supplement classroom research; f) demonstrate learning through the use of multiple media; and g) publish to a wider audience beyond the four walls of the classroom.  

The SURWEB process challenges teachers to go outside the traditional textbook model for classroom information.  It supports teachers to research and use a wide range of media and source documents in creative ways to enhance teaching and learning.  It has demonstrated its value in improving access to technology resources for teachers and students in the state of Utah.  Most importantly, evaluation studies during the course of the project’s development have found that the use of SURWEB contributes to student learning, especially in tasks requiring higher-order thinking skills. 

SURWEB has met and exceeded all objectives related to its original goal of improving education through the innovative uses of communication technologies.  SURWEB users from any geographic area are now able to customize local resources for learning and thus rely on a student-centered approach that places high value on the home culture of students.  Toward this end, in 1999, SURWEB created iMatrix, a consortium of strategic partnerships for knowledge and information sharing with educators around the United States. The iMatrix program makes use of a consortium model that enables SURWEB to scale up the promising practices and lessons learned from the initial five years of the project. The growing iMatrix project further enriches the virtual archive of multimedia classroom resources and will support an expanding vision of digital, networked, multimedia learning resources across the curriculum.