From...

October 27, 1999
Web posted at: 8:43 a.m. EDT (1243 GMT)

by Liane Gouthro

(IDG) -- Do you know where the Faeroe Islands are?

Of course you do. And so does Mr. Blevens' fifth-grade class at Bill Arp Elementary School in Douglasville, Georgia. (Yes, the islands lie north of Scotland.)

But these fifth-graders learned by e-mail.

On September 21, the class began a geography project that involved sending an e-mail message and tracking its response around the world.

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Teacher Robert Blevens sent the message to 25 friends, and asked each to reply to the class and tell their location so the students could plot it on their world map. Recipients also were asked to forward the message so that the students could see just where in the world it would go.

And the message did go far.

In fact it reached all 50 states, every country in Europe, and all seven continents. The class received responses from Tasmania, New Zealand, Iceland, and even Ross Island, which, as the class could tell you, is located off the coast of Antartica.

In less than three weeks, the class received over 27,000 responses.

"I thought maybe we would get hundreds of responses by mid-November," says Blevens. "But we just had no idea. [The response] went way above and beyond what we expected."

Avoid e-mail hail

The volume of e-mail on the class's Yahoo account quickly soared out of control. The e-mail account was closed on October 7, a day that the class received more than 9,000 messages.

While he was not given any notice or reason for the account being closed, Blevens says he certainly understands. "It was probably due to the volume of messages we were receiving. You are given a certain amount of space and we used it all up and then some," he says. It was "almost a relief" when the account was finally terminated, he adds.

And Blevens warns other teachers against jumping too quickly into similar projects, noting a "need for control" when such an endeavor begins.

Yahoo agrees, though the company does not comment on why specific e-mail accounts are closed. Catherine Davis, producer for Yahoo's Yahooligans site, suggests that when personal contact is desired, a class can write targeted messages addressed to certain people.

Phone calls are still coming into the Georgia elementary school from people who tried to e-mail the class but couldn't. Postcards and even gifts keep arriving from all around the world. It's one geography lesson the class will never forget.