Looking for new ways to inspire your second-level students and promote their research and teamwork skills? Thought about a web-based project but were too afraid of the technology?

Lack of technical know-how doesn't have to matter, according to Brendan Tangney, organiser of Spin A Web, a competition for teams of school students to prepare a web site on the topic of their choice. You just have to find one or two students with those skills.

"The teachers who succeed are the ones who say: `I don't know how to make a web page, but I'm happy to facilitate you, the students, in doing it,' " Brendan explains.

The teacher, it seems, must be prepared to change his or her role from being "a sage on the stage to being a guide on the side".

Now in its fifth year, the competition is run by the Department of Computer Science at Trinity College, where Brendan is a senior lecturer, in association with Eircom and the National Centre for Technology in Education.

The standard of entry is phenomenal. Last year's runners-up, five students aged 14 to 17 from Sutton Park school in Dublin, have recently returned from Barbados, where they won the schools category of the Cable & Wireless International Childnet Awards (see panel review below).

Sutton Park's winning site is Mission Possible, (www.suttonpark.ie/ missionpossible), which challenges children to save Agent E.N. Vironment from the evils of pollution, by reading articles and reports and playing games.

"We were interested in the environment, but it's seen by many as something geeky, so we wanted to make it seem cool to save the environment," explains one of the winning students, Rhea Fitzgerald. "It involved a huge amount of work over about seven months, especially research, but it was a huge amount of fun."

"We started the project for the Spin A Web competition, but when it got going it was so rewarding that the competition didn't matter any more. It was especially exciting getting messages from celebrities to include on the site, including one from Bono."

Tom Kendall, the teacher at Sutton Park who co-ordinated the project, describes one of the attractions of web-based projects: "It's one thing to post a message about your area of interest on the school noticeboard; it's another thing to publish it on the web, where people all over the world can read about it. That is just so attractive to people of that age."

Rory Byrne, who was in second year when he worked on the Mission Possible project, says the group learned "a huge amount about teamwork. Also, we like to think we took computing into a new dimension in the school - made it less nerdy."

Brendan Tangney argues that the computer skills element is only secondary to the primary benefit of web-based projects. "IT in education should be used to support sound educational principles and not as an end in itself."

"One of the areas where IT and education overlap happily is in project-based - or openended - learning," he says. "Students are researching, writing and editing, doing graphic design work, and programming, so there's an emphasis on team that you normally only see in sports or music."

So how to get started? "The students must have a deep interest in the subject, whether it's hurling, fashion, Vikings or whatever," says Tom Kendall. "You need at least one student who's good at writing, one for graphics, one with computer skills and one with a leadership ability."

The Spin A Web 2000 winners will be announced later today. The event is being filmed for the RTE 1 technology programme, Dot.What?, which airs on Monday nights at 8.30 p.m. Read more about Spin A Web, and look at the finalists' projects from previous years at www.cs.tcd.ie/spinaweb. Next week: Planning and building your own site or page for yourself or your school.