25 years ago, 33-year-old British scientist Tim Berners-Lee created one of the greatest tools the human race has ever seen. The World Wide Web opens doors for billions of people worldwide and makes the impossible possible - plus, Innovate My School couldn’t exist without Berners-Lee’s invention. Phil Worms, Iomart’s director of Marketing & Corporate Comms, comes to IMS to discuss why the net is so invaluable for education.

Happy Birthday World Wide Web! It is 25 years since a young British computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee submitted his idea for allowing scientists to share information between educational faculties across the world to his manager at CERN. The idea that his boss described as a “vague, but interesting” started a revolution in learning which continues today. It has changed the way we teach, the way we learn and how we access information and communicate with each other.

Before the World Wide Web entered the classroom, we learned by rote from a teacher who wrote things on the blackboard with white chalk – the traditional ‘talk and chalk’ approach. If we wanted to source or research information, we either made notes, referred to our text books or visited a library. This doesn’t compute for the school child of today. Today’s students are better connected, have millions of sources for reference and are more globally aware than ever. It’s quite incredible how much knowledge can be accessed at the click of mouse or the swipe of a screen.