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Virtual Education Offers Global Opportunities for Students and Teachers

February 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Middle school students in California, for example, watched Chinese dancers perform during a recent virtual field trip. Some schools are even making virtual education with foreign educators a part of their curriculum.

In Michigan, educators have partnered with colleagues in China to offer virtual education exchange opportunities that allow students to communicate with each other, often through videos, online. During the next school year, students will have the chance to attend a real Chinese school, taking virtual classes according China’s time zone, at their own schools during the hours of 8 p.m. and 4 a.m.

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Online explosion takes hold in Ripon schools

February 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment

California Connections Academy @ Ripon will open as a public charter school in the fall, becoming the latest in an exploding array of online options in the area.

It will join this year’s online startups — Turlock Unified’s eCademy Charter at Crane and Modesto City School’s Modesto Virtual Academy — as well as current district online programs and at least a dozen independent charters.

Online schools have, it appears, gone viral.

The Ripon charter was granted by Ripon Unified School District in January; the school will serve kindergartners through graduating seniors.

Though its home district is in San Joaquin County, it is eligible to sign up students from all adjacent counties as well: Alameda, Amador, Calaveras, Contra Costa, Sacramento, Santa Clara and Stanislaus.

Ripon Unified Superintendent Louise Johnson said the district did its homework before granting the charter and sees it as partnering with the online group. The district will provide some arm’s-length oversight, but the charter school will manage its own finances and answer to its own board of directors.

“We were very favorably impressed,” Johnson said. “The program is quite interesting because they have a mix,” she said, listing online webcasts, real-time classes in which students interact with the teacher and classmates, and traditional work.

The district’s enrollment is stable, Johnson said, and she sees the charter as attracting home-schoolers and students who were using other online options.

“I think the instructional program is solid and if I’m going to have students in a virtual school, I want the instruction to be that solid,” Johnson said.

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Stanford Online High School grants diplomas to academically advanced students

February 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Powerhouse high schools hardly bring to mind virtual spaces, but an online high school operated by Stanford could alter that perception.

The Stanford Online High School (OHS), previously called the Education Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY), was established in 2006 and currently serves more than 400 students, including both full- and part-time students.

EPGY was founded to provide classes that academically talented students could use to supplement their regular high school curriculum.

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Another View: Data can bedevilcharter schools

January 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Kathleen Gibbons, a Rocklin parent whose child attends a public virtual school, is a board member of California Parents for Public Virtual Education. She is responding to the Jan. 2 editorial “Charter schools should embrace accountability,” which stated: “The California Charter Schools Association, in setting its own higher standard for measuring charter schools, has started a lively dialogue centered on the right thing – student performance and how to measure it.”

Last month, the California Charter Schools Association announced an initiative that would have tragic ramifications for some public charter schools. Under this proposal, any charter school failing to meet the association’s arbitrary standards would not be permitted to renew its charter. After close examination, though, the educational community may want to rethink CCSA’s assessment and its effort to limit parental choice under the guise of accountability.

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Pearson’s U.S. Online Public Schools Fall to Bottom of Class

January 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Jan. 6 (Bloomberg) — Online public schools, where students as young as kindergarteners log on from home to take classes, don’t make the grade, according to a study released today.

Less than a third of the “virtual” schools managed by for- profit companies made adequate progress toward meeting state standards last year, compared with about half of all public schools, according to the report from the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The findings demonstrate that online public schools, which educate more than 200,000 students nationwide, don’t have the results to justify their growth, said Gary Miron, lead author of the study and a professor at Western Michigan University.

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Opinion: Fighting for the future of California education

December 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment

As a parent and active member of the California Parents for Public Virtual Education (CPPVE), I have a vested interest in items of education policy. Regardless whether a student attends a public school in a brick-and-mortar classroom or at home in the virtual environment, a student deserves the best in academic and social opportunities.

As parents, we want to give our children a chance at a bright future. However, it seems that even those with the best of intentions can sometimes stray from their original goals and neglect the interests they originally sought to serve.

Recently, the California Charter School Association (CCSA) announced a new initiative that would have tragic ramifications for a number of California public schools. CCSA suggests that any charter school failing to meet its (CCSA’s) arbitrary standards not be permitted to renew their charter. After close examination of CCSA’s assessment methodology, the educational community may want to rethink CCSA’s assessment rubric and their ability to bully individual schools and limit students’ academic opportunities. Included in their list are two public virtual schools: California Virtual Academies at Kern County and Insight School of California-Los Angeles.

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Study of Miami-Dade’s Virtual Learning Lab Reveals Key Success Factors for “Blended Learning” Programs

December 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment

MENLO PARK, Calif., Dec. 15, 2011 — /PRNewswire/ — As online learning programs become prevalent in U.S. schools, school and district leaders, teachers, and policy makers are looking for the best ways to use technology to enhance learning. A new SRI International report, Implementing Online Learning Labs in Schools and Districts, provides such a guide for creating successful blended learning programs that can benefit many students.

The report summarizes lessons learned from the pilot year (2010-2011) of the Virtual Learning Lab program, a collaborative effort between the Miami-Dade County public school district—one of the largest in the country—and the Florida Virtual School—a state-wide, Internet-based public high school with the highest enrollment in the country. SRI researchers collected information on 5,500 students in 38 public high schools through surveys, interviews, focus groups, and site visits to seven schools.

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Ballot initiative seeks to expand access to online education

November 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment

For public school students in California, where you live usually determines where you can learn. To David Haglund, that’s not right.

This month, Haglund, principal of the Riverside Virtual School, an online independent study program run by the Riverside Unified School District, introduced a statewide ballot initiative that would give students unrestricted access to publicly funded courses — wherever they are.

The California Student Bill of Rights Initiative is “designed to eliminate control by ZIP code,” Haglund said.

Under the proposal, schools, districts and county education offices would be required to make available to all students the courses needed for admission to the state’s universities. Those courses, known as A-G requirements at the University of California and California State University, could be offered at a student’s school or district of residence or any other publicly funded school, and they could be classroom-based, online or a blended model of the two.

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Screen test for the online classroom

November 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment

It’s important not to hype shiny new tech toys, but there is some synergy between these instant, downloadable lectures and the iPad type of tablet computer. The Open University, one of the world’s most popular providers of iTunes U material, has reported the disproportionate rise in downloads to iPads.

In the US, more than 2,300 school districts have begun programmes using iPads – and a growing number of classrooms have one per pupil.

But what will all this mean for the future?

“Virtual schools” have become an increasingly common feature of the US system, teaching children who are mostly at home. Along with the arrival of charter schools, there are also virtual charter schools, funded by taxpayers.

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A different model for online schools

November 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The school is the Education Program for Gifted Youth, also known as the Stanford Online High School (SOHL) because of its affiliation with the university. Let’s look at how it differs from the typical charter online school — say, Arizona Virtual Academy (AZVA), which is part of the K12 Inc. for profit corporation.

Start with money. AZVA is free to students. The state gives it somewhere in the $6,500 to $7,500 range per student. SOHL is private, and expensive. It costs $14,800 a year, or $3,200 if someone wants to take a single class.

AZVA has a 50-to-1 student-to-teacher ratio. That’s not a typo. It’s really a 50 to 1 ratio. Kinda makes you wonder why a school without buildings or sports or drama or music programs and which has about half as many teachers per student as bricks-and-mortar schools gets the same amount of state funds per student as the other schools, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t conservative budget hawks be all over this waste of taxpayer money?

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