“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.

For the rest of the article, go to Ketchikan seeks to broaden ways of learning

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

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

Come take a look!

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

Mr. Packard added, “I am also excited about our partnership with Middlebury College, Middlebury Interactive Languages. The first online language courses from this venture, beginner French and Spanish for high school students, will be available in pilot programs this Fall. In addition, we are making progress with the integration of our acquisition of KC Distance Learning and we look forward to serving more states, schools, school districts and students with their online curriculum.”

For the rest of the article, go to K12 Inc. Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2010 Results

“Our elders have told us that we need to document their knowledge. But not just that, we need to find ways of imparting their knowledge through the schools,” said Jana Harcharek, director of Inupiaq education with the district.

To help do that, the district brought up consultant Jay McTighe, who specializes in the field of curriculum mapping and alignment and co-authored several books on the topic.

For the rest of the article, go to North Slope educators plan Inupiaq curriculum

As in 2008-2009, six schools in the North Slope School District met the standards and five did not. In the Northwest Arctic Borough School District, five schools met the target, an increase over the four that did the year before, and seven did not.

That’s a cause for celebration, said Northwest Arctic School District Superintendant Norman Eck.

For the rest of the article, go to 11 North Slope and Northwest Arctic schools pass federal test

“For me, every student that I can help them see a way to get through, whether it’s their G.E.D., or high school completion, I want to do that,” she said, “so they don’t have the same sort of climb that I did.”

To that end, Delta/Greely schools runs what it calls a “cyberschool” – a statewide correspondence charter school of about 450 students.

Ford Slack says it employs certified Alaska teachers, many of them out of Delta.

“We tend to work with students that have dropped out two and three times to try and transition them and get them through high school,” she said.

So when she gets to Sitka High School, Ford Slack says she wants to help teachers integrate technology into curriculum. Some of us might remember taking a computer class in school. But Ford Slack says technology is not a specific class or a credit anymore. She says it’s something that needs to be part of all education.

For the rest of the article, go to Profile: Career in education comes from own time in school