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Plato Launches Virtual Academy

March 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Accreditation for the academy will be provided by the Northwest Accreditation Commission (NWAC) with the virtual academy designated as a distance education school. Established in 1917, NWAC is engaged in school accreditation in Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Washington.

“Our goal is to help schools and districts to improve student achievement. The Plato Virtual Academy is an important step forward in doing that,” said Jamie Candee, Plato Learning vice president of product and marketing. “We are here to partner–not compete–with educators to meet the needs of 21st century learners.”

For the rest of the article, go to Plato Launches Virtual Academy

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With virtual platform, Alaska high school reverses decline

February 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment

When Virtual High School Global Consortium, a non-profit organization specializing in collaborative online education and professional development, offered 25 students spots at a reduced price in exchange for one Advanced Placement teacher, Petersburg saw it a as an opportunity to be able to offer their students more diverse classes.

Now Petersburg offer engineering, architecture, art history, and veterinary science, among other classes. Sue Hardin, the school’s English and Spanish teacher, says that she facilitates advanced placement classes for student in some Northeastern schools, as well as that Oklahoma, Washington State, Switzerland, Venezuela and even China.

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News: Anchorage, Alaska Hosts National School Choice Week Event

January 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment

National School Choice Week (Jan. 22-28, 2012) shines a spotlight on the need for effective options for all children, including great public schools, public charter schools, private schools, virtual schools and homeschooling. Planned by a diverse and bipartisan coalition of citizens and organizations from across the country, National School Choice Week will reach hundreds of communities and tens of millions of Americans in 2012. The week was launched last year to highlight the need to enhance educational options for families across the country. Currently, children in 35 other countries outpace U.S. students, and an American student drops out of school once every 26 seconds.

“With this event, Anchorage residents are continuing an important discussion about the benefits of educational freedom for children and families,” said Andrew Campanella, vice president of public affairs for National School Choice Week. “To ensure that every child receives an effective, quality education, discussions like these are important for every community across our country, and we are very happy that Anchorage residents are using National School Choice Week to discuss the importance of educational options in Alaska.”

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Time for Virtual Schooling to Grow-Up

October 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Virtual schooling is a good idea. Over the past decade or so, online education has proven itself a valuable component of the learning system, from elementary to post-secondary. I personally use a lot of online learning in my own teaching, so I am a tried and true advocate for online learning.

But, it needs to grow up. And fast. As online learning approaches the knee of the exponential curve, we can’t ignore it as just a small tangential sandbox. With 200,000 full-time virtual students nationwide and growing, it is core to the system now and we need to treat it that way.

In a new brief my partners Gene Glass and Kevin Welner, of the National Education Policy Center, articulate many of the current problems in the P-12 online learning space. There are serious, documented quality concerns and in some cases a near total lack of traditional accountability and oversight. The Washington Post this morning provided a good summary. The abuses are appalling and could cause a national backlash against the use of online learning in the P-12 learning system.

For the rest of the article, go to Time for Virtual Schooling to Grow-Up

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Ketchikan seeks to broaden ways of learning

September 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The Ketchikan School District is becoming more flexible and effective in reaching every student’s needs with its burgeoning distance learning, homeschool and summer school programs, officials say.

“It’s really about individualizing the whole instruction,” Fast Track Virtual School Director Bill Whicker said.

Revilla Alternative School has offered traditional homeschooling programs for K-12 students since its founding in 1973, Revilla Principal Doug Gregg said. It continues to offer those, and support for homeschool families through the Fast Track program.

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Virtual Schools, E-Learning, Sweep The States

August 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The number of online high schools across the country continues to grow with virtual schools now operating in 12 states and five other states working on similar projects, according to Education Week’s annual School Technology Report.

The editors of the fifth edition of Technology Counts 2002: E-Defining Education, praised the growth in online classrooms, but warned that the quality of such programs must be monitored.

“E-learning is poking holes in the walls of the traditional American classroom and giving students unprecedented access to challenging course and academic material,” says Virginia B. Edwards, the editor and publisher of Education Week. “But there are still problems and unanswered questions about this way of teaching and learning. And one of the chief concerns is ensuring the quality of online courses.”

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VirtualEDU.org Offers Online High School & Middle School Classes for Under $50 a Month

March 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

“VirtualEDU announced today that it will begin providing all of their 200 fully accredited high school online classes to students for a subscription price of just $49.95 per month. With critical funding shortfalls in all in states, we are concerned that rapidly increasing class sizes will severely reduce student learning,” stated Executive Director Dana Delane. “We are offering a class size of one through the individualized instruction that can occur through online learning to school districts, charter schools, independent schools and parents who want to see their students succeed.”

Blended learning, where students take both online and live classes, and online learning have dramatically increased in the past few years as more and more schools provide online classes for credit recovery, summer school and to offer subjects where there is no available on-site teacher. The Los Angeles Times reported that LA Unified school district has gone from just 300 students using online credit recovery last year to over 2,500 this year. According to Clayton Christensen, author of Disrupting Class, “In the year 2000, roughly 45,000 K-12 students took an online course. In 2009, more than 3 million K-12 students did.”

For the rest of the article, go to VirtualEDU.org Offers Online High School & Middle School Classes for Under $50 a Month

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School Choice Offers Opportunity for the Teaching Profession

January 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

As technology changes and evolves, the world of education and teaching will undoubtedly change. Teachers across the country must stay ahead of the curve.

Although some teachers and the unions see school choice as foreboding for the public school outlook, school choice encompasses empowerment for the parent to choose an environment that employs teachers in all arenas. A new era has been ushered in for education. Once limited to rigid traditional school terms and schedules, teachers are employed in traditional public schools, charters, private schools, religious schools, and online schools just to name a few. Educators will in turn have choices themselves when deciding when, where and how to teach kids.

For the rest of the article, go to School Choice Offers Opportunity for the Teaching Profession

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Best Online High Schools gets new design

December 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Best Online High Schools has now been updated with a new design and new features. This new version will continue to provide you with the best information available on the Internet about online high schools.

Come take a look!

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Virtual education spurs UAS Sitka building boom

October 12, 2010 By Leave a Comment

SITKA, ALASKA (2010-10-11) The growth of “virtual education” in the state has spurred a building boom in Sitka. The Sitka campus of the University of Alaska Southeast is close to opening 19,000 square feet of additional classroom space, much of wired with state-of-the-art tools for delivering distance education.

The racket in the big bay of the UAS Sitka campus is a construction class. They’re building a kayak shelter for neighboring Mt. Edgecumbe High School. The actual construction in this building is all but over. The spaces campus director Jeff Johnston is showing me will be occupied in November.

For the rest of the article, go to Virtual education spurs UAS Sitka building boom

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