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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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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.”

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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.

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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.

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K12 Inc. Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2010 Results

September 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Ron Packard, Chief Executive Officer of K12 Inc., stated, “We are quite pleased with our record results for fiscal year 2010. I am proud of the many accomplishments of our students, teachers and employees. Over 1,000 students graduated this year from virtual schools using the K(12) curriculum. This past year we began serving students in four new states: Alaska, Oklahoma, Virginia and Wyoming. We will be adding schools and reaching students in two new states this Fall, Massachusetts and Michigan. On the product development front, we completed the development of our new elementary school math curriculum as well as six new courses for our high school students. In addition, we are launching a new Online School platform this year that is adaptive, intuitive and web-based; that provides access to our online lessons, lesson planning and scheduling, and facilitates our progress tracking, assisting both parents and teachers.”

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.”

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North Slope educators plan Inupiaq curriculum

August 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

About 50 educators and school administrators met for a weeklong in-service Aug. 2 to 6 to set the groundwork for how Inupiaq education will be incorporated into North Slope Borough School District classrooms.

“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.

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11 North Slope and Northwest Arctic schools pass federal test

August 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Eleven schools in the North Slope and Northwest Arctic Borough school districts met educational targets set by No Child Left Behind for the 2009-2010 school year, while 12 did not, education officials said in the state’s annual progress report.

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

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