Teacher education

A friend of mine passed this on to me with the note:

“Not everyone is happy about this. There are users who are not too.”

-Bill would create ‘virtual schools’ for K through 12

Sunday, March 5, 2006MARK BLISS ~ Southeast Missourian

Some area school superintendents worry about the financial effect on local districts.

http://www.semissourian.com/story/1142545.html

Missouri children could get an education — kindergarten through high school — without ever setting foot in a school building under legislation working its way through the Missouri House.

The bill would require the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to establish a “virtual school” by July 1, 2007. Students in kindergarten through 12th grade could enroll full- or part-time in a virtual school.

Proponents say it would be the most comprehensive “virtual school” system in the nation.

DESE deputy commissioner Bert Schulte said his department expects to contract with Internet companies to offer several virtual schools in the state. Read more

Tags: virtual school , cyber school , high school , education

Virtual Schooling in the News.

The Google news alert for virtual school.

District mulls fiscal realities of online school Greater Milwaukee Today – WI, USA

At the Country Springs Hotel and Convention Center Thursday night, the Wisconsin Connections Academy showcased the Foat family to a group of area parents thinking about sending their children to the Appleton online charter school. The Foats, Waukesha residents, live within the Whittier Elementary School boundary. The Foats decided, though, to enroll their third-grader, Sam, and their first-grader, Katie, into the Wisconsin Connections Academy, the state’s first kindergarten through eighth-grade online elementary school. [ See all stories on this topic ]

Virtual School bill moves forward Aberdeen American News – Aberdeen, SD, USA

The state Education Department should regulate the increasing number of electronic courses offered to South Dakota students, lawmakers decided Monday. HB1236, which would create a state framework for Internet and televised courses provided to high school students, won final approval from both chambers of the South Dakota Legislature Monday. The House voted 64-4 and the Senate voted 33-2 Monday to send the bill to Gov. Mike Rounds, who requested it

Will virtual school encroach upon homeschool Joplin Independent – Joplin, MO, USA

If you are a proponent of education and you follow legislative activity about education, you already may be aware of House Bill 1275 introduced by Representative Brian Baker. HB 1275 requires the State Board of Education to establish a virtual school by July 1, 2007. Any student in kindergarten through grade 12 could enroll in this virtual classroom, regardless of where the student lives in Missouri. The participating student would be officially enrolled in the district of their residency. No opposition to HB 1275 was voiced in either the House or Senate committee hearings.

Online schools exploding across the United States Greater Milwaukee Today – WI, USA

When the fax machine finally cooled Friday, Heidi Laabs estimated 1,060 applications were received for iQ Academies, the Waukesha School District’s online charter high school. Friday marked the end of Wisconsin’s open enrollment period, a three-week window when Wisconsin parents can apply to send their children to schools other than their local school. Laabs, executive director of curriculum and instruction, said Waukesha School District officials expected iQ Academies would receive about 1,000 applications.

Phys ed students today need ingenuity Myrtle Beach Sun News – Myrtle Beach, SC, USA

The Pensacola News Journal reported the other week that a former Escambia County middle school gym teacher was charged with six counts of bribery. According to the Sheriff’s Office, Terence Braxton charged Ward Middle School students a dollar a day to get out of physical education class. The school principal expressed surprise and told The Washington Post that the 28-year-old second-year teacher had “a very good rapport with the kids.” I do not doubt that. A dollar a day would be a bargain at twice the price.

Kids who skip school get costly lesson Cleveland Plain Dealer – Cleveland, OH, USA

The 17-year-old East High student hid her face in her jacket when she learned that skipping school Wednesday would cost her mother $150. “Oh no,” the girl winced, “my mom’s going to be mad.” The girl was one of 35 students, all eighth-graders or older, picked up during the first of the Cleveland School District’s weekly truancy sweeps to be conducted until the end of the term. School security forces and city police focused on neighborhoods around Martin Luther King and East high schools.

Can we graduate from high school already? Minnesota Daily – Minneapolis, MN, USA

Very few twentysomethings admit wanting to go back to high school. After all, no one misses the insecurity, the fear of not being cool enough and the superficial relationships interrupted by the occasional backstabbing. Or do they? College students, and others in their 20s, must have a secret nostalgia for their teenage years ‘ or they wouldn’t be on MySpace.com. That’s because MySpace is really just a huge virtual high school populated by the same prototypes we all remember. The site reduces real people with actual interests and in-the-flesh friends to participants in an addictive, two-dimensional popularity contest. The whole thing is akin to collecting wallet-sized school pictures of your “friends” when you were 14 years old. Whether you aimed for quality or quantity, your popularity was determined by who appeared in that stack of photographs.

A virtual arts experience Lake County Record-Bee – Lake County, CA, USA

EcoArts of Lake County will bring its 2006 Sculpture Walk to a computer near you, thanks to a $5,000 grant from SBC. The Excelerator grant will help create a CyberWalk of pieces in the 2006 Sculpture Walk, whose actual works will reside in 107-acre Middletown County Trailside Park, off Route 175. Sculpture made from, or relating to nature, is sited along both sides of a 3/8 mile central trail through meadows and woodland.

The Google news alert for cyber school.

Colleges going cyber: Tech transforms recruiting USA Today – USA

The day after the Super Bowl, the undergraduate admissions office at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland e-mailed 108 high school seniors in the Pittsburgh area to congratulate them on the Steelers’ victory. That might seem odd. After all, what does the Super Bowl have to do with college admissions?But technology is transforming how colleges communicate with high school students they are trying to woo.

House passes anti-bullying legislation WIS – Columbia, SC, USA

School employees would be required to report bullying under a bill that received final House approval Wednesday. The “Safe Schools Climate Act” prohibits students from harassing, intimidating or bullying other students and includes a provision banning cyber-bullying. The bill now goes to the Senate, which passed similar legislation last year. Under the House version, the Board of Education would have until September to develop model policies for school districts. [ See all stories on this topic ]

Cyber centres to close at 1am Malaysia Star – Malaysia

Within weeks of implementing its new guidelines on cyber cafes and cyber centres that favoured the outlets, the Subang Jaya Municipal Council has been forced to re-look at the new regulations. MPSJ has come up with a stern decision. Opening hours are until 1am. MPSJ president Datuk Mohd Arif Abdul Rahman said the council had met residents and the cyber cafe and cyber centre operators when it came up with the recent guidelines. They were implemented last month. “However, we have found that all the excuses that the operators came up with to maintain their late operating hours were unfounded,” he said. “Hence, we have decided to ask them to close at 1am.”[ See all stories on this topic ]

Parent says charter schools save NA money Pittsburgh Post Gazette – Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Rather than being a financial burden, students who attend cyber charter schools save money for North Allegheny taxpayers. That was the message Elsie Spry delivered to the school board at its meeting Feb. 15. Mrs. Spry, a Marshall resident, made her brief presentation in response to an earlier report from financial services manager Mike Hopkins. At a school board meeting in January, Mr. Hopkins had estimated that the district paid between $350,000 and $380,000 to cyber schools for the costs of educating about 41 students whose parents live in North Allegheny.

David Hendricks: Magnet school going further on cutting edge San Antonio Express (subscription) – San Antonio, TX, USA

Business Careers High School students and teachers will step even closer to the “real world” of business this fall with wireless laptop computers and a new curriculum, thanks to a $1.8 million makeover and solid support from the San Antonio business community. Started in 1991 at the behest of then – USA chief Robert McDermott, the innovative Northside Independent School District magnet school has prepared thousands of high school students for college studies and business careers.

Tags: virtual school , cyber school , high school , education

A new series that Darren at Teaching and Developing Online had posted a while ago that I am only getting around to posting now.

- Stats 2007-2008

- Stats 2007-2008 Part 2

- Stats 2007-2008 part 3

- Stats 2007-2008 Part 4

- Stats 2007-2008 Part 5

- Stats 2007-2008 Part 6

- Stats 2007-2008 Part 7

- Stats 2007-2008 Part 8

Jukes on Virtual Schooling.

So, I was listening to Kevin Honeycutt’s Driving Questions in Education podcasts, specifically one that he did with Ian Jukes entitled Getting beyond the full frontal lecture (I actually came across him from my good friend Clif – see Clif Mims from NECC ).

Anyway, about 29:00 minutes in Kevin and Jukes get to talking about virtual schooling and Jukes cites virtual schools in Alberta and British Columbia as examples that should be modeled. Without being negative towards virtual schools in those two provinces, as someone who has been studying the virtual school movement for a while now if I were to pick virtual schools that should be held up as a model for other schools the Florida Virtual School (FLVS) would be at the top of my list. I’d also have the Virtual High School Global Consortium (VHS) near the top as well.

I hold these two up as examples because in the beginning both were founded with large grants which allowed them to take their time, plan things out, and get started on the right foot. It also allowed for a great deal of research and evaluation to be undertaken to ensure that things were going as they should. While the virtual schools in Alberta and British Columbia are as old (or older) than FLVS and VHS, almost all of them were created at the district-level with very little in the way of funding. So they grew in a very piecemeal, trial and error kind of way. Don’t get me wrong, they have grown into great virtual schools – but they didn’t have the funding to be as deliberate as FLVS and VHS in the beginning.

Throughout the time Jukes talks about virtual schools, he makes some interesting quotes:

-”virtual teaching environments”

-”not just about digitizing information and leaving it online for people to use”

-”what we have now is no more than distance teaching”

In many respects, I think that Jukes is probably a little more familiar with the cyber charter schools – which are largely a digital curriculum with a teacher as evaluator (and I’ve written at length about this – check the tag on Wisconcin on the right to see some of those comments). I say this because the virtual schools that I have become familiar with, both in Canada and the United States, are much more than information online.

I also have to take issue with Jukes’ distinction between distance teaching and distance learning – in the same way I take distinction with the whole student-centered learning issues (I mean regardless if a teacher is up front droning on, doesn’t any learning have to be student-centered – the teacher certainly isn’t the one doing the learning -> but that’s a debate for another day in another forum). The term teaching, regardless if we are talking about a virtual school or a brick-and-mortar one, has gotten a bad rap. For whatever reason, it is assumed that students must learn in an independent way, on their own and if there is teaching involved somehow it is bad. If we focus upon the practice and the art of teaching, somehow we are forgetting about the student because we can teach all we want and unless the student wants to learn the student won’t learn. While there is some truth to ensuring that the student is a willing participant in the process, the act of teaching can’t be neglected and we can’t assume that the student is the only thing that needs to be focused on.

Similarly, Jukes made the following statement which I found very telling:

“you have to have level of discipline, you have to have set of skills
and knowledge and habits in mind that are completely different”

So what about the students that don’t have those skills, knowledge and habits? Do we just assume that those are the ditch diggers of the future and focus upon those students who do possess those attributes? This is the biggest problem I have with virtual schooling and K-12 online education… to date the research we have indicates that it only serves a select group of students and that some K-12 students simply aren’t capable of or suited to online learning. The problem with this is when you find situations like in m home province where a student if they want to graduate from high school with the regular curriculum (as opposed to the basic curriculum) must take online courses as they aren’t offered in this school in any other format. And what we are starting to see is that students capable of passing in the regular stream and choosing to take the basic program so they can avoid taking online courses. This means that the only options these students will now have after high school is to go directly into the workforce or to go to trade school, because the basic curriculum makes them ineligible for any other form of post-secondary education. So what of the students that don’t possess these qualities?

Anyway, the portion on virtual schooling begins around 29 minutes and ends around 36 and a half minutes. Take a listen and let me know what you think.

I’ve been asked by one of our readers to get This report from the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy for your attention.

You’ll see that the thrust of the arguments of newspaper links young people who take illegal drugs to violent behavior and gang membership.

But what interested me was the strong case made for preventive measures. The paper says:

Teens participating in the activities between the hours of 3:00

sphyrnatude
April 3, 2009 at 9:29 am

personally, I LIKE this idea. As someone who is definitely considered evil by many, I want to know how much they’re going to pay me to shut up.

Reply

4 Comments.
sphyrnatude
March 27, 2009 at 7:22 am

I’m still amazed that you hung in for three years. I looked at teaching there, and I just couldn’t bring myself to teach elementary school science as “college”. Of course, from what I’ve seen of your work, the English dept. is a lot higher level than the sciences….

In any case, Job Well Done. I’ve watched you grow through it, and the students that you’ve touched have definitely benefited.

Reply

2 Comments.
fermat
March 19, 2009 at 10:44 pm

Sounds like someone was trying to use “legalese” and didn’t bother with the dictionary.

How about “incur”?

Reply

9 Comments.
Mrs. Chili
March 6, 2009 at 12:25 pm

CTG, that’s exactly what *I* wonder, too. HOW did this kid pass the prerequisites to get into MY class? WHO was his composition teacher, anyway?!

Kizz, I have to be careful with my facial expressions – I’m sure I’m the dictionary illustration under the definition for “WHA?!” (though, judging from the looks on my students’ faces, none of them is getting it, either…)

Mamacita and Melissa – I almost HOPE this kid has some sort of diagnosable disorder – at least then there’d be some hope for him. At this point, though, he’s not availed himself of the extra attention I’ve recommended; if it’s up to him to make himself better, I think he kind of IS doomed…

Sphyrnatude, I’m SO glad you’re back – I’ve missed your blogging voice on my computer. Yeah; I’ve not “given up” on the boy, but I’m not killing myself about him anymore, either. I’ve literally done everything within my responsibility (and then some, really) – the rest is out of my hands.

He DOESN’T particularly upset by his lack of progress, Dingo, no. I got an encouraging email back from my boss, though, who essentially told me to not fret about it as I’m doing everything I’m supposed to be doing for this kid (and I’ve got all the paperwork to back it up). Still, I won’t be at all surprised when he comes back at me mad about his grade…

Reply

Well, following two slow months, let’s hope that things can get back on track again. With only three entries in September and six in October (five of which have come in the past seven days), let’s hope this recent flurry is a sig of things to come.

The counter on the left hand side is up to 2545. My statistics counter tells me that there were 217 unique visitors to this blog, including 182 first timers and 35 repeat offenders. That’s an average of seven per day.

This month they all came from the United States, Canada, or the United Kingdom. It appears that most found me through various search engines.

They came to read:

- Supporting Different Learning Styles Through Virtual Schooling

- Virtual High School for North Carolina

- Virtual Schools Offer Wider Selection

- Growing Number of Homeschoolers in Virtual Schools That’s about all for this month, stay tuned…Tags: virtual school , cyber school , high school , education

Questions for those Involved in Virtual High Schools.

One of the other blogs that is devoted to virtual schooling is Deciding About Schools Online (DAOS)– note that this blog is no longer available. I don’t think that it would be unfair to characterize this blog as one with a specific agenda (as most blogs, and even websites, do). On its purposes page is states that it has two main purposes:

DASO provides an accurate and regularly up-dated directory of those involved with deciding about e-learning in Ohio.
DASO provides professional annotations of resources on the topic and links to written documents that these stakeholders have published regarding K-12 e-learning.

However, these purposes may not provide the agenda in as specific a way as some of the questions that were asked in a survey that was conducted at their site a while back. With stems such as:

-The state subsidy for online schools should be the same as it is for all schools.

-School districts should accept successful completion of an online course (replacing seat time) for the purposes of granting credit.

-In the near future K-12 Schools will turn to the resources of the private sector in order to develop their own for-profit products and services.

These stems for the likert-style questions have led me to believe that DAOS is more interested in cyber charter schools than state-wide or public virtual schools (and to see where cyber charter schools can lead, take a look at Online Christian Education – an Alternative to Public Schools from the The Christian Post – I’ll post more on this attempt to destory public education later I’m sure). I’ve posted trackbacks to their blog and I’m sure that they can correct me if I’m wrong.

I don’t out them here because I think that this agenda is wrong (although I do disagree with the concept of charter schools, but that’s neither here nor there at the moment – see my entries on Are Superintendents the Problem? , The Next Big Thing in Public Education? ). I out them because in my reading of the DAOS blog, I don’t see that agenda mentioned anywhere, and I think that’s wrong. As I have stated many times in this blog in the past, my agenda is providing educational opportunities to rural school students within the public education system.

In any regard, around the middle of last month DAOS blog featured a couple of posts asking questions of specific groups involved in virtual schooling. For example, they posted an entry entitled “Questions for Policy Makers” that asked:

The questions that require attention (QAR’s) for policy makers start with these:

-How do appointed officials best communicate their understanding of e-learning?

-What expectations should appointed officials have of e-learning?

-How do elected officials discuss e-learning with their constituents who have experienced education in an entirely different context?

-What should be the expectations for e learning in the context of a standards based reform movement?

-What assurances exist that e-learning experiences will conform appropriately to teaching and learning standards at the state and federal levels?

-Can e-learning assist students in making progress toward the goals of No Child Left Behind?

A few days later in a post entitled “Questions for Educators”, they posted:

Among the questions that require attention by educators are:

-How will these new schools alter the types of preparation needed by teachers?

-In what ways will the communication between teachers and students change and what can teachers do about it?

-How can the fact that a teacher is not in a building effect ongoing professional development?

-Should there be certification issues associated with being a teacher in an e-learning environment?

-What impact should virtual schooling have on colleges of education?

-What guidance can content selection standards provide?

-What different expectations should administrators have in shifting to an e-learning environment?

-How will e-learning effect financial planning for administrators?

-How will students in e-learning perform on standard tests–both formative and summative and what should administrators anticipate?

-What avenues for job growth are there for administrators in e-learning?

-How necessary is it that professionals in e-learning be trained online?

-What drives the professional development train–using content or using technology, and in what combination?

Regardless of their agenda, these aren’t bad questions for the most part. The only problem that I see are scope and number. How many educators have the time to sit down and consider all twelve of these questions, let alone actually come up with answers for all of them…

So, I ask you today in looking at these questions… If you fall more into the policy-maker category, which two questions do you see as the most burning right now? And, do you have any thoughts about your responses to those two questions?

If you fall more into the educator category, which two questions do you see as the most burning right now? And, do you have any thoughts about your responses to those two questions?

Tags: virtual school , cyber school , charter school , high school , education