HREE years ago, Doris Ranke, a high school science teacher in Michigan, stumbled across a company that could help her use the Web as a teaching tool. Called HighWired.com, the service provided an easy-to-use template to post homework assignments, moderate discussion forums and exchange e-mail messages with students or parents. And the best part was that it was all free.

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"The results were staggering," Ms. Ranke said of her Web site. "Kids who were quiet in class would spill their guts on the discussions, students would e-mail me questions about homework. My contact with kids was 24/7 if I wanted."

Eventually, Ms. Ranke, who taught at West Bloomfield Senior High School, near Detroit, trained eight other teachers to use HighWired. But when she retired in June 2001, enthusiasm for the class Web sites seemed to fizzle. Today, only five West Bloomfield teachers have pages on HighWired. Some of them have not used the site since the day they were trained. Others have not updated their pages in a year.

Across the country, school Web sites — which were once hailed as a way to let parents know what Johnny was doing in school — have become a science experiment gone awry. While some sites are useful, educators say many are nothing more than a bulletin board of lunch menus and teacher rosters that are rarely updated or are not used at all.

Some of the ghost sites are victims of dot-com companies that promised a wide menu of services, often at no cost, and have since gone bust. But in most cases, educators blame the lack of use on inadequate training, tradition-bound teachers, a shortage of computers and inflated expectations.

"The fact is that both educators and companies providing Web site services underestimated how difficult it was to gather, format, present and refresh so that people would keep coming back and find it useful," said Peter Grunwald, president of Grunwald Associates, a consulting firm in Burlingame, Calif., that focuses on the technology link between home and school.

In partial results from a survey that the firm is conducting, only 55 percent of students who say their school has a Web site have even visited it. The main complaint about the sites is that they do not have useful information.

One problem, experts who study school technology say, is that many classroom pages are static, with teachers posting a syllabus for the entire year or simply links to interesting Web sites. So visiting the site is not part of a daily routine for students and parents, particularly if only a few of their teachers have classroom pages. Even if students and parents do visit, they often find outdated information, like homework assignments from last week, or worse, the previous year.

"If you go to a site one or two times and the data is old, parents won't be confident and won't go back," said Torrance Robinson, founder and president of eChalk, a company that sells Web-based communication tools to schools.

Jim Haight, a government teacher at Chestatee High School in Gainesville, Ga., who until this year taught at another school in the county, said that district officials wanted updates to all Web pages, including individual teacher sites, to come through the central office.

"If the Webmaster was out of town, it wouldn't be updated for days," Mr. Haight said. "My argument to the county was that if I wanted to post homework assignments, it didn't do me any good to wait a few days. Their argument was that they wanted to monitor what went out."

The result was that few teachers created classroom pages, Mr. Haight said. So last year, his school contracted with an outside company to serve as host for its Web pages so that teachers would be able to upload information directly to the Web site.

Other hurdles remain in keeping classroom sites up and running, educators and technology experts say. For one, many cash-strapped schools are saddled with old servers and some do not have computers in every classroom, making it difficult for harried teachers to find a machine during the day to update their Web sites. What's more, while 98 percent of the nation's K-12 schools are wired to the Internet, access to the worldwide network is still uneven, said Bill Thomas, director of educational technology at the Southern Regional Education Board, an organization that advises 16 states on education policy.

"Even in states that brag about close to 100 percent connected, they mean to the building, not the classroom, or if they do, they may have one workstation connected in a classroom," Mr. Thomas said. "And many schools are still connected by dial-up."

Perhaps the biggest problem is technophobic teachers who are wedded to traditional ways of teaching. When Grunwald Associates asked school-district technology leaders to rate the competency of their teachers in using the Internet for instruction, more than one-third of the teachers in large districts were classified as novices. Only 18 percent were called experts.

The training of educators to use the Web as a classroom tool has often been spotty at best and is usually left up to teachers like Ms. Ranke in Michigan, who still runs sessions in her retirement. Many classroom Web sites were created in the late 1990's, when a flurry of dot-com companies, like eChalk, HighWired, Pearson and Nschool.com, tried to capture a share of the e-learning market by signing up as many of the nation's 92,000 K-12 public schools as quickly as possible. In the process, few companies worried about training teachers in how to set up Web pages or cared whether the teachers followed through.

"Private sector companies saw education as a huge money cow," Mr. Thomas said.

At one time, HighWired boasted having 12,000 schools. But a quick check through their pages even today reveals that most are blank. The company went bankrupt in 2001, and its assets were acquired by the Concord Consortium, a nonprofit education and technology organization based in Massachusetts. But the transition was rocky — the site was down for a month at the start of the last school year — and many teachers were alienated when in the waning days of HighWired, the company tried to charge subscription fees.

"There were lots of problems, and it became so frustrating that a number of teachers just gave up," said Les Holliday, an English teacher at South Park High School near Pittsburgh who still uses HighWired.

Concord officials, who say they have 4,500 active teachers, plan to begin offering professional and curriculum development services at the site next month to attract more teachers to HighWired.

Even for teachers who regularly update their classroom pages, some Web features have proved more useful than others. Sharon Cohen, a world history teacher at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, Md., for instance, refuses to post a weekly calendar of assignments because she doesn't want to get locked into a schedule. Instead she posts a syllabus for the year.

And while some educators promote the Web as a way to break down the communications barrier between school and home, some teachers would prefer that those barriers remain, Mr. Grunwald said. "The formula being offered to many teachers is to work really hard to master the technology and in return you're going to be bombarded with a lot more parent comments and inquiries," he said. "That's not the most attractive proposition for some."