Scholastic Launches Scholastic.com Website

Posted on November 3, 1999

Scholastic Inc. has launched Scholastic.com, an online learning destination for teachers and students. The site's focus is on providing literacy skills for the 21st century, including information management, critical thinking, reasoning, problem solving, self-expression, and fluency in reading, comprehension and writing.

"By developing high-quality curriculum products that meet children's learning goals, Scholastic has built a brand that's widely known and trusted, reaching 1.5 million teachers, 40 million parents and 26 million kids," said Richard Robinson, president, CEO, and chairman of Scholastic Inc. "We will use this brand power and our unique relationship with schools and families to convert our millions of offline customers into Scholastic.com users. We are starting now by providing online curriculum to teachers and children in school. Next year, we will expand by adding e-commerce for teachers and parents, and school-to-home curriculum assistance for parents and kids."

Scholastic.com includes a newly designed, teachers' site, featuring interactive tools and over 12,000 pages that support the daily curriculum and learning goals of K-8 teaching, including classroom-tested lesson plans, reproducibles, interactive Web activities, teacher resources, and author interviews. Scheduled features include: The First Thanksgiving Project, which takes kids back to the 1600s to relive the voyage of the Mayflower; discussions with well-known authors every month, including historical fiction writer Jean Fritz, and J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter books; an expedition tracking the migration patterns of sea turtles in Costa Rica; "Writing with Writers," a workshop in which students learn genre-writing from award-winning authors; and other games and activities in every curriculum area.

Scholastic.com also introduces "The Scholastic News Zone," an area of the site offering daily updates on student-appropriate current events, pop culture features, student polls, and news-based participatory activities. By fall 2000, the site will offer e-commerce, enabling teachers to purchase books, software and professional resources online, and school-to-home learning opportunities, allowing parents to buy curriculum materials and get advice to support their children's learning at home.

"The vast majority of schools today are wired, with teachers using the Internet in classrooms," said Ruth Otte, executive vice president, Scholastic New Media and Internet. "To meet the needs of an education constituency that's becoming increasingly computer literate, Scholastic.com is providing teachers with the best standards-based interactive curriculum on the Internet. We've also taken great care to insure that teachers at all levels of computer literacy can navigate the site, integrate its content into their daily instruction, and obtain real learning results."