sitesALIVE Foundation

About the Foundation - Our History

In 1993, Ocean Challenge, Inc., founded by entrepreneur, world champion sailor and former high school teacher Rich Wilson, pioneered a new learning concept called sitesAlive!. This interactive educational expedition appeared online with Prodigy and in print through Newspaper in Education (NIE) programs.

The sitesALIVE! premise was simple: kids love adventures; kids love computers; once the kids are hooked by the adventure of on-line learning, teachers can feed them multiple subjects via this format. In its initial offering, this innovative teaching tool reached 100,000 families online, 13 million newspaper readers weekly for 11 weeks, and 250,000 NIE students.

Since 1994, 64 full semester online programs have connected classrooms to academically accredited field schools on land or sea worldwide. Each program's K–12 Teacher’s Guide is correlated to National and State Curriculum Standards. The live essays, journals, Q&As, photos, and audio files coming daily and weekly from the field site bring alive the concepts of the teacher's guide activities.

Today, the sitesALIVE! program is making learning come alive for hundreds of students in school systems worldwide. In 2000, sitesALIVE! won the Newspaper Innovators in Education Award given by the Newspaper Association of America Foundation. In 1999, sitesALIVE! was named a finalist in both the Children’s and Education categories of the Ziff-Davis Global Information Infrastructure Awards. USA Today announced that "Anyone with any doubts about the educational value of the web should click to sitesALIVE!…."

Yet as the testimonials to the value of internet-based learning opportunities grow, it has become increasingly clear that this innovative and effective teaching tool is available to a very limited audience. Many of the students and teachers, especially those in lower income or smaller school systems, who stand to benefit most from the engagement, adventure, enhanced content and global perspective offered by internet-based education, cannot access it. The sitesALIVE Foundation was established in 2002 to address the key barriers to access: teacher training in using computer technology and integrating Internet-available curricular content into their classroom teaching, and funding for budget-constrained schools to acquire real-world program content. The Foundation will seek donations from individual, corporate, government and foundation sources committed to supporting enhanced K–12 education and will disburse funds to qualified school systems who apply for assistance in obtaining teacher training and curricular support.