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Interview with Karl Sarnow
By Carlo Nati
 Who is Karl Sarnow
Karl Sarnow has a PhD (Dr.rer.nat) in Physics and he teachs Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science at a German Gymnasium. He is at the time of this writing seconded to the European Schoolnet and he works there as the Xplora Portal Manager.
What is Xplora
Xplora is the European Science Education Gateway, with links to resources, events, news, teaching units and all kind of information about formal science education. Xplora is part of European Schoolnets series of portals for education. It was funded by the PENCIL project, guided by ECSITE, "the European network of science centres and museums." The PENCIL project was funded within the FP6 framework of the European Commission.
What is Xplora's aim
Xplora aims to help teachers to give exciting science lessons* by reinforcing links between informal and formal education. Our main target groups are teachers of all levels and all types of schools in Europe.
Who collaborates in the project
Within Xplora, we have teachers cooperating in projects, working together in creating materials, writings describing how to use existing material, upload their own material or simply profit from others' work by downloading material. We have a group of teachers which develops eCourses for the use in the classroom and we distributed a free educational DVD for them, on which all our lessons are based. So every teacher can freely get a lot of lesson plans, software and complete courses without costs and he can distribute it to colleagues and pupils.
In the wider sense of the PENCIL project, we have science museums and research institutes which offer teachers their cooperation. They develop pilot projects, whose outcomes you already find on our Xplora-Knoppix DVD (Version 1.2) and which will be completed and made more visible in the Xplora-Knoppix DVD Version 2.0.
The PENCIL partners' pilot projects are the core of the PENCIL project and they are the basis of innovative new approaches introduced within the project. It is very important for Xplora to have access to the potential of the informal learning paths represented by the members of the PENCIL consortium. This is a step into the future use of their support for the formal education system, i.e. teachers.
 XPLORA teachers conference at CERN
The target
Teachers are clearly our target group. More than 99% of our kids are exposed to teachers. There is no escape for them. This means that it is an excellent investment in the future, to support teachers to do a good_teaching_job.
Also remind you that every teacher influences about 5000 children during his professional life. So teachers are a valuable and precious resource, which we have to care for. We want to enable every teacher to be motivative, inspiring. Therefore we try to equip him/her with a set of ICT tools. We know that ICT is not all in education. But it may help.
What is a web experiment
A web experiment is a normal real experiment, normally built with material available at every good equipped school laboratory. So just an experiment you normally find on a school labs desktop. The new thing is that you can control a web experiment remotely just with your web browser. No installation or configuration of software needed. The web server showing the webexperiment is connected to the experiment by an interface. On our next edition of Xplora-Knoppix (Version 2.0) we will have a complete description incl. the electronic circuit diagram to build your own web experiment. It is easy and cheap to do with this description.
Xplora and formal and informal education
Xplora is part of the PENCIL project, guided by ECSITE, "the European network of science centres and museums". As Xplora is hosted by European Schoolnet, it is Xplora's part to bridge the gap between formal and informal learning within the project. The PENCIL project partners are mainly from the informal learning or research side. That's why Xplora focuses on formal education. To influence science education in a constructive way, formal and informal education have to supplement each other. This is Xplora's role: Giving the informal education scene a platform as well as the formal education members (teachers) the resources to profit from the informal input.
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