Virtual schools are cost effective and allow for certain flexibilities (in scheduling, environment), but are critics worry about the lack of individualized learning, the loss of a face-to-face student-teacher relationship, and the lack of socialization. This article examines these points, allow ample room for virtual school proponents to mount a defense.

by Athena Jones / CNN / 30 January 2012

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It’s a Tuesday morning in January, and seventh-grader Katerina Christhilf is learning algebra. But it’s no ordinary class. This one takes place entirely online, led by a teacher a few miles away.

As part of her training to become a ballerina, Katerina takes dance lessons four times a week, including up to eight hours on Fridays. All that training makes it hard to go to a conventional school, so she takes science, literature, composition, vocabulary, history, music, art and French – a full course-load – from the comfort of her home, through Virginia Virtual Academy, a program run by K12 Inc. that began operating in the state in 2009.

“Ballet is really important to me and it’s usually in the mornings, so if I went to school I would only be able to go on the weekends,” Katerina explained. “Sometimes I’ll study in the morning and I’ll do a few classes and then I’ll go to ballet for maybe like three or four hours and I’ll come back home and I’ll do some more.”

Katerina is one of a growing number of students who go to school online full time. About a quarter of a million students in kindergarten through 12th grade were enrolled in full-time online schools last year, according to the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, a 25% increase over the previous year. Some parents choose these schools because their children are struggling in traditional schools; others do so for their flexible schedules.

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Journalist John Bohannon takes up how new social media and internet technologies are changing the learning landscape.

by John Bohannon / Online Educa Berlin / 9 September 2011

John Bohannon

Nowadays we use the Internet as an extension of our brains. If we wish to find out the name of the actor we have just seen in a movie we google it on our computer or smartphone. We can look up the recipe of a dish or re-read a newspaper article we liked at any time online. But this way of accessing information “in the cloud” is changing the way we process and store information. We no longer try very hard to recall facts, and students are now better able to remember how to find information than the actual information itself.

What are the implications of this for teaching and learning? John Bohannon, a Boston-based journalist for Science magazine and visiting researcher at Harvard University will examine this question in his keynote speech at OEB 2011.

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In this short piece, Saltman discusses the most popular web tools for educators, with an emphasis on classroom management and communications.

by Dave Saltman / Harvard Education Newsletter 27.2 / March-April 2011

In the quest to work smarter, not harder, teachers are flocking to an ever-expanding galaxy of web-based tools for help with everything from classroom management to classroom discussions. Here are some tools that are now grabbing teachers’ attention—and the attention of their students. Virtually all are free, with a few offering paid upgrades that add some technological bling.

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Assess-as-You-Go–a University of Illinois College of Education research project funded by the US Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences–was featured on WAND news, focusing on how the project may make summative, standardized testing a thing of the past. Project commentary was given by Bill Cope, the project’s principal investigator; Sarah McCarthey, collaborating faculty; and Colleen Vojak, project coordinator. For the story, see here.

An encounter with Timothy and Cynthia’s Shanahan’s introduction to disciplinary literacy. The duo are reading experts at University of Illinois-Chicago. Timothy Shanahan’s blog (which chronicles the visit described in Gewertz’s blog) can be found here, at Shanahan on Literacy.

by Catherine Gewertz / Education Week blog / 10 March 2011

Ever since that morning I spent in a basement in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood a few weeks ago, I can’t get text complexity off my mind. Nor can I shake the image of the opening slide in a PowerPoint presentation about “disciplinary literacy”: a curvaceous woman in leather and high boots, carrying a whip.

Contrary to what you might think, I did not make that up to get your attention. It really happened. I was hanging out with teachers from a high school in the Bronx at a professional-development day that was part of a city pilot on secondary literacy.

The pilot was prompted by New York’s adoption of the common standards, which harp heavily on the need for students to be much stronger at grappling with complicated informational and literary texts, and the need for teachers to learn “disciplinary literacy” strategies to help students decode the challenging grammar, vocabulary, writing, and ways of thinking specific to each subject.

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Image Source: Daniel Fazier, HHMI Bulletin

The article reports claims that goal-setting programs lead to student success, by encouraging students to break down larger goals into smaller ones that are less intimidating and more achievable in the short-term.

Making Kids Work on Goals

by Sue Shellenbarger / Wall Street Journal / 9 March 2011

Thirteen-year-old Jackson Sikes has been struggling for years to raise his test scores in math. When he got a 33% last year on fractions, Jackson says, “I didn’t know how I was ever going to learn them.” Battling his homework just made him frustrated, says his mother Linda, of Gilmer, Texas.

New research suggests the inability to set personal goals is a weak spot for U.S. children and hurting their academic achievement. Sue Shellenbarger explains.

Jackson’s teachers proposed a solution: They taught him to trim his goal into smaller steps and try improving his scores just a little from test to test. Gradually, he raised his results to 90%. “I’d take those little steps, then I’d just keep on stepping,” Jackson says.

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