Anne Hughes, a modern languages teacher at Duncanrig secondary school in South Lanarkshire, Scotland, is a big fan of the internet: "We use it for so many things. My students log on to French websites, such as newspaper and magazine sites, and the great thing is that unlike a book, the information is up-to-date. We've also set up an e-mail link with a French school and the pupils have formed pen pals. I wouldn't want to be without the internet now."

She is not alone. Across Europe, millions of students in thousands of secondary schools, colleges and universities are connected to the internet and are using it for a wide range of educational activities.

Billions of euros have been poured into numerous European, national, regional and local projects dedicated to getting schools and colleges online. The private sector has also played its part in wiring up education, with companies such as British Telecommunications, Cisco Systems, Deutsche Telekom, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Nortel, NTL and RM playing a pivotal role in online projects across Europe.

In 1999, the European Commission launched the eEurope initiative with the objective of bringing Europe online. When the European Council, consisting of ministers from member states, met in Lisbon in March 2000, one of its requests was for all EU schools to be connected to the internet by the end of 2001. This request became part of the Commission's eLearning initiative but, in fact, many European countries were already ahead of the game, having launched their own programmes to get schools online years earlier in March this year, the Commission reported that 80 per cent of the EU's schools were connected to the internet.

But why the rush to get schools and colleges online? Why divert valuable resources to PCs, networks and telecoms services rather than to books or extra teachers? Ingegerd Warnersson, the Swedish minister for schools and adult education, says there are several reasons why her government has invested in information and communications technology (ICT) in schools: "There are reasons of equality and fairness. Basic ICT literacy must be given to all students and not just to those with well-to-do parents and computers at home. ICT can be a driving force for change in schools and can open them up to the wider society. ICT is also a preparation for becoming an active citizen and it can generate new forms of understanding."

Michael Wills, the UK's minister for learning and technology, says the investment in ICT is justified for two main reasons: "Ninety per cent of new jobs require some form of involvement with ICT. So when you want to get a job or move jobs, you will need these skills. There is also increasing evidence that when ICT is used effectively, these technologies can drive up standards."

However, internet usage in schools and colleges across Europe is patchy, with some countries, such as Denmark, getting schools online years before others. There is also much variation at a local level and even within schools: "Some schools have a lot of experience with the internet but others are just starting to invest in it," notes Stefan Aufenanger, from the department of education at the University of Hamburg. In many cases, internet usage is determined by the amount of support coming from a local authority or agency, or by a teacher's experience, confidence and enthusiasm in ICT.

Most national educational networking projects include a teacher training component, designed to improve teacher competence and confidence, and some governments also offer subsidies for teachers to purchase their own computers.

One of the internet's most powerful features is its ability to bridge the gap between time and distance with e-mail, chat facilities and forums to encourage communication and collaboration between schools across Europe. European Schoolnet was launched in September 1998 and is a joint venture supported by 23 ministries from around Europe, including the 15 EU member states, Norway, Switzerland, Slovenia and Iceland, plus the European Commission.

Roughly 25,000 pages are downloaded from the Schoolnet site every day, with an average of 2,500 users visiting every school day. In March, Schoolnet had almost 68,000 visitors. In May, Schoolnet ran eSchola, an online programme which encouraged schools across Europe to participate in collaborative projects and activities.

Schoolnet also hosts three networks - myEUROPE, the European Network of Innovative Schools and the Virtual School - which offer curriculum-based projects for schools and teachers. "It's wonderful to see a teacher from Finland meet another from France and then watch them working together. You can't beat the mixture of languages and cultures," says Alexa Joyce, Schoolnet's news editor.

Crucial role of e-mail

It is easy to see why e-mail is so popular within schools and colleges. For the cost of a local telephone call (or less), students and teachers can contact anyone else with a PC and an internet connection almost anywhere in the world. Teachers report that e-mail helps to sustain collaborative work with schools based overseas, as communication is quick and easy. In many educational institutions, students and teachers now have their own personal e-mail addresses.

Conferencing involves linking together e-mail messages within a group, such as a group of science teachers discussing a topic or a form teacher communicating with his tutor group. Denmark's national school network, Sektornet, offers more than 2,000 open conferences (which can be accessed by anyone) and more than 20,000 closed, or private, conferences. Conferencing can also be used for supporting or training teachers online.

Examples of this type of service include the UK's Virtual Teachers Centre, Germany's Lehrer-online and Sweden's Schoolnet, which provide teachers with classroom resources and materials, as well as providing a forum for teachers to share ideas and exchange information.

Many people use the internet to search for information and then download it. "Most internet users are surfing the web for information and collecting it," notes Dawn Mulholland, sales and marketing director of UK educational internet service provider (ISP) DIALnet. But while many see the benefits of using the internet as an information source, this type of activity does have critics, as students can waste a lot of time looking for information.

The European Commission, among others, maintains that too much of internet activity is passive. "The internet is a two-way communication medium and it's not just about reading other people's work, but producing your own materials and publishing them to a wider audience," says Angela McFarlane, professor of education at Bristol University in England.

Institutional websites

A large number of schools and almost all colleges and universities now have their own websites. Often these sites are used to market the educational institution; for example, publishing the school or college prospectus, displaying sports results or showing the various facilities on offer, such as a sports centre or computer laboratory.

More and more educational websites are offering e-mail, allowing parents to send messages to their child's tutor or subject teacher, or to inform the school office that their child will be absent.

Pupils can sometimes access the school's network from home to collect homework assignments and e-mail them back on completion. Some parents can even log on to the school's website and access a secure area (often by using a password) to see their child's weekly homework assignments, or check attendance records and test scores.

Internet technology has found its way into many internal school and college networks in the form of intranets, private networks that use internet protocols and a web browser. Schools store various materials on their intranets, including lesson plans and resources created by teachers, as well as materials downloaded from the internet.

As a result, intranets are secure environments with the added benefit that accessing them incurs no online or telecoms charges. Intranets and the internet are often used for management and administration, with schools and colleges sending data electronically to government departments, examination boards and local authorities. Some institutions are also using e-commerce services to purchase goods such as stationery, although most schools still use traditional forms of communication for this process, such as phone, letter or fax.

There is a lot of excitement over the concept of the virtual classroom, with students and teachers meeting online via e-mail, chat and even video-conferencing facilities. Small or rural schools are seen as ideal candidates for virtual classrooms, because it would allow them to offer pupils a wider range of subjects. For example, a foreign-language teacher could be shared among several schools, meaning schools could broaden their curricula. The virtual school is an exciting concept, but at the moment it remains confined to small pilot projects.

Many believe virtual classrooms will become feasible when more and more networks have high-speed, or broadband, connections. While most universities and colleges have broadband networks, they are still being rolled out across European school networks. Some countries, such as the Netherlands, have extensive cable networks giving wide access to broadband, but in many countries most schools use ISDN digital telephone connections, which are about twice as fast as a telephone modem and do not allow transmission of high-quality sound and video.

This greatly restricts the usefulness of the internet, claims Lewis Bronze, chief executive officer of Espresso Broadband. "If you look at the typical classroom teacher today, he or she uses notes, textbooks, pictures, CD-Roms and video. The internet today cannot offer this variety of media," he says.

ADSL is not the answer

Mr Bronze says even ADSL services, which offer broadband connections through normal telephone lines, will not be the solution. Because ADSL users connected to the same telephone exchange share the capacity of the network, 50-100 computers on a school network would bring ADSL's fast data speed down to a crawl.

Espresso Broadband delivers educational materials to schools in the UK via satellite. Schools download the resources (which are updated weekly) on to their network servers and then run them over high-speed intranets. France is also experimenting with satellite delivery, although it is primarily seen as a means of distributing the internet to schools in rural areas.

"Broadband will bring symmetry to the internet: instead of people just pulling content from the internet, they will publish content a nd contribute," says Professor Stephen Heppell, director of the Ultralab ICT research centre based at Anglia Polytechnic University in England. Software companies such as Microsoft, RM and Granada Learning, and broadcasters that offer educational materials, such as the BBC, are adapting their products to be delivered online via broadband services.

The internet is blurring the line between home and school, and this has implications for government policy in education. More than one in four homes in the EU (26 per cent) now has access to the internet, one of the highest penetration levels in the world, trailing only the US and Japan, with 56 per cent and 31 per cent respectively.

The European Commission reports that the number of homes connected to the internet grew by 55 per cent between March and October 2000. Eurostat, the EU's statistics unit, estimates that the number of internet users in the 15 member states passed the 100m mark by the end of 2000.

But that still leaves millions of homes with out easy access to the internet. The eEurope action plan calls for wider public access to online services and some governments have launched programmes to do this. For example, in March the UK government launched a £10m (E16.6m) project, Wired-up Communities, which aims to install computers in schools and 12,000 homes located in deprived areas across the country.

Over the next year or so, students and teachers will start accessing the internet from devices other than the PC, such as digital television and mobile phones (mobile phone penetration in EU countries is almost 40 per cent, and in some European countries, such as Sweden and Iceland, it is approaching 100 per cent).

The University of Twente in Enschende, the Netherlands, is taking part in a project known as M-poort, which involves KPN, Ericsson and Lucent Technologies. KPN has distributed more than 10,000 Wap-enabled mobile phones to students who use them to contact tutors and to access information.

The internet is already transforming school curriculum and administration systems. For example, in France, most 15- and 16-year-old students take an examination that includes using the internet for research and making a presentation on a PC. In many national curricula, core ICT skills, such as searching for information on the web and critically assessing it, are now seen to be as important as literacy and numeracy skills. But so far, most examination boards have been slow to embrace ICT.

The vast majority of examinations are still completed with pen and paper, but a pilot programme in Northern Ireland points to one possible future role for the internet. In April, 300 students in Northern Ireland sat trial examinations via computer screens. The project, run by the Council for the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment and the technology company Edexcel, involved students answering examination papers on a PC screen using a keyboard and mouse. The completed examinations were sent back to the CCEA via e-mail.

Most school-based internet projects have involved funding from local or national government, which often covers the cost of equipment, software, networking, installation, support, service, content and telecoms charges. But most projects are designed to run for a fixed term and the question now is how educational networks will be sustained when the funding runs out. Some governments are looking at public-private partnerships to provide a solution.

"Bringing in capital from the commercial sector is the way to go," says David Burrows, head of education at Microsoft UK.

But there are some who question this strategy. "You do have to worry about exposing children to greater commercialisation on the internet. There have to be guidelines to protect children," says Professor McFarlane of Bristol University.

In the past few years, the internet has changed the face of education across Europe. But Ray Fleming, secondary business manager of UK educational ICT company RM, says: "What you're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg. During the next 10 years, we're going to see students doing some amazing things on the internet."

William Scharling, who is responsible for Denmark's Sektornet school network, concurs: "The internet has transformed Danish education, but we are still at the stage of learning how to use it. The next phase will see everyone using the internet in even better ways."

Computers and the internet will continue to move towards the centre ground of education, but Mr Wills, of the UK government, says its impact should not be over-hyped: "The internet is a fantastically powerful medium, but the classroom will remain at the heart of education. Children will still continue to learn socially and teachers will still remain at the centre of education."

Email George Cole at georgecole@dial.pipex.com