The KIDS-96 Annual Celebration

The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th of May, 1996

At the end of the year-long KIDS-96 project, KIDLINK invites the children to "chat" with each other in a global electronic dialog.

We do this to bring the children closer to each other on our "Birthday", to play with modern communication technologies (to learn), and to tell the other kids out there about our projects.

Last Year's KIDS-95 Celebration

Last year was KIDLINK's fifth birthday and we had plenty of action! Over 4,000 kids participated over the three-day period. They joined in from more than 79 sites and 15 countries:

Australia,

Canada,

Denmark,

England,

Finland,

Iceland,

Israel,

Jamaica,

Norway,

Slovenia,

Sweden,

Ukraine,

Uruguay, and the

United States. Many sites took part in the KIDLINK IRC "chat", a huge interactive keyboard-to-keyboard dialog that spans the globe.

Here are some reports from the field.

Many sites used KIDCAFE and other KIDLINK lists to send e-mail, communicated with fax machines, telephones, internet phone, and even video.

The KIDPLAN SITE95RP file contains an index of all report files for the KIDS-95 Celebration.

This Year

KIDLINK has seen explosive growth in the last 12 months. Much is due to the growth and availability of real-time Internet services at the home and school levels. So you need not always travel to the nearest university so you can go interactive on "the big days."

Still, like all other KIDLINK activities, it takes a lot of planning and volunteer effort at all levels to make it happen. All participants get more out of it the earlier that planning is started and continues, so send in your registration and join KIDPLAN to participate in the development of the Celebration.

SITE Information

We need information about your local plans in order to be able to coordinate the action. Our primary tool is a set of files, that are stored primarily on the KIDPLAN list.

In years past, we had a collection of files that contained detailed descriptions of each site's plans. For this year our enthusiastic volunteer Joyce Burtch has made an annotated directory for all Celebration related files: KIDPLAN C96. For you are of special importance the following TWO files.... In the first file: KIDPLAN C96SI, we are listing the Site information details from all the schools/sites that sent in registrations. And in the second file: KIDPLAN C96OT, we are listing the Site operating times for the Annual.

The KIDPLAN C96SI and the KIDPLAN C96OT files will be updated frequently as the preparation continues.

Register NOW!

If you would like your site (no site is too small!) to be listed in KIDPLAN C96SI, please registrate! If your WWW Browser supports FORMS, you can submit your registration here, other users can get the registration template and information here.

If you are interested in trying to participate, submit what you think you might be able to do (be an optimist!) and then update us when your plans come together.

The submissions for KIDPLAN C96SI should be sent directly to celeb-reg@kidlink.org, not to KIDPLAN or other lists. If you feel the need to expand on a topic or you have some other communication method you want to try out, please explain it and we will try to squeeze in the data some how.

Remember! The Annual Celebration planning takes place on the KIDPLAN list, so if you are not already subscribed, now is the time. As a minimum, you must be subscribed to the KIDLINK list. Subscription to the KIDLINK list is required to participate in the Annual Celebration. If you have another reliable way of regularly reading the KIDLINK list messages such as a BBS newsgroup, then you do not need to subscribe personally.

Go to the Home Page

KIDS-96, the KIDLINK name and associated logo are service marks of the KIDLINK Society.

KIDLINK Annual Celebration Coordinators: celeb-team@kidlink.org

Updated May 1, 1996