Archive for the ‘Online Education’ Category
I want to share with you some quotes from inspired people in history and literature. These quotes have made me happy and given me something to think about. They have led me to decide to provide online education to children. I hope you will enjoy them as well.
Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you. â¨- Aldous Huxley
A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions. â¨- Anonymous
“…there is something you must always remember, you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think….” Pooh Bear ( I was always partial to Winnie-the-Pooh)
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This spring we received a letter from the parent of a graduating student. Her daughter had been in the public school for many years. She is on an IEP and, despite her learning difficulties was able to make a two year gain in our school this year. Her mother wrote:
“I want to thank you for a wonderful first year of virtual learning. I was very concerned it would be more difficult than it was. The programs you used were very user friendly which made learning for” my daughter “much more enjoyable. There is nothing like working from home. No lost days of education due to snow days, no distractions from other students. Virtual learning let my daughter move at her own pace, although you pushed her when she needed pushing. I was also very pleased with the fact that if she needed you for support your were readily available, or it wasn’t long before you were. …. We are looking forward to your continued support through these last 4 years of schooling. I was also very pleased with the amount of growth Kyrsha was able to make, again this is another advantage to virtual learning. There is no box limiting my child “and ” no one moving on with out my child having mastered concepts. I am so glad we made this move to virtual learning. It has been one of the best decisions I could have made for my child’s educational needs….”
A virtual learning environment also has great appeal to parents of children with disabilities
because these schools can provide individualized programs as a pace that best suits their child’s learning, offer extensive opportunities for parental involvement, allow for the use of technology which accentuates existing assisted technology for children with disabilities,
“Technology has enormous benefits for the learning process, and promises to change the nature of schooling and heighten its productivity. Curricula, teaching methods, and schedules can all be customized to meet the learning styles and life situations of individual students; education can be freed from the geographic constraints of districts and brick-and-mortar buildings; coursework from the most remedial to the most advanced can be made available to everyone; students can have more interaction with teachers and one another; parents can readily be included in the education process; sophisticated data systems can measure and guide performance….” (Moe & Chubb, 2009).
In fact, when families were asked to identify what made a virtual learning environment especially effective for students with disabilities, these benefits where listed:
Individualized support and instruction and tutoring,
Ongoing and immediate feedback,
Self-pacing,
Opportunities for students to take control of their own learning,
Promotes students ability to choose how best to access information,
Lack of peer pressures, conflicts or distractions,
Supports alternative means of social interactions,
Equalized the the academic and social “playing field” through new technologies.
The National Association of State Directors of Special Education recently completed two studies to determine whether students with Disabilities were electing to go to a virtual school. Their findings showed that these student were as much as 14% of these students, with Individualized Educational Programs (IEP) were opting for a virtual education.
Why are more students and their families turning to Virtual Schools for their learning?Virtual schools can develop and deliver an academic program that fits the individual students’ unique learning needs. They have the potential to open new educational opportunities to children with disabilities allowing them to work alongside their peers without disabilities, provide frequent and immediate feedback, present material in a variety of ways that better suit their child’s learning style and offers more control over the learning environment such as when and where their child works.
Yesterday we briefly looked at the first 4 steps when doing a Project Based Learning assignment. It should be easy to see how nicely this allows for individualization and homeschooling curriculum. Now let’s look at the last 5 steps.
5.Make a list of what needs to be completed with a timeline: What information is needed to solve the problem? How are the possibilities ranked? How are they relate to the list of solutions?
6.List “What do we need to know? You will have already started this list in step 2 but as you have looked more closely at your question, there may be additions to the list. Start the research. Parents can help find possible resources, â¨experts, books, web sites, etc.
Make up a timeline listing the tasks/question being researched. This will help to stay focused and organized. *If your research supports your solution, go to (7). If not, go to (4)
7.Write up your solution with its supporting documentation â¨Findings and/or recommendations should include the problem statement, questions, data gathered, analysis of data, and recommendations based on the data analysis: in short, the process and outcome.
8.Review your performanceâ¨: â¨Take pride in what was done well well and learn from what could have been done better. Thomas Edison felt unsuccessful experiments were part of his journey to successful outcomes!
9.Celebrate the work! Find a way the project can be shared with others. It could be anything from addressing the town council to putting up a video on U-tube.
PBL is a perfect match for a virtual school. It is an effective way to integrate technology used by the school into the curriculum. Like a virtual school, its potential is a limitless.
We recently got involved in a workshop to learn about PBL or Project Base Learning. Would it fit into a homeschooling program? Could it be used successfully in a virtual learning environment? Did it allow for the necessary individualization which is so important to Mistacres School?
PBL is an approach to teaching across the curriculum by allowing students to explore real-world problems. These projects can last a few days or can go on for a semester. They allow the students, either individually or collectively, to develop a deeper knowledge of the subjects they are studying through direct involvement. It is a way to provide active and engaged learning.
It is obvious students are more likely to remember things they learn through an active, hands-on approach then the more traditional textbook-centered learning. But as important is the confidence and self-direction students gain as they move through their project. As students work through their projects they strengthen their organizational and research skills, develop strong communication skills with peers and adults, and will often have opportunities to work within their community and see first hand effects of their work.
Assessment also becomes reality-based, not on some arbitrary fill-in-the-blank test that asks them to regurgitate what a teacher has said. Students are evaluated on the basis of their projects which has more meaning to them and is more in line with how were are assessed as adults in the real world. How often as I teacher did I hear, “Why do we need to learn this? I’ll never use it!” PBL allows students to see how academic work connects to real-life issues.
The next post we will look begin to look at the steps involved in Project Based Learning.
For those of you who visit Mistacres School on Facebook or at the home site, you know that we graduated our first student at the end of June. Following is a letter that we received from the mother of our graduate. I share it with you because I believe she spoke to many of the reasons why Mistacres was formed.
“I want to thank you for a wonderful first year of virtual learning. I was very concerned it would be more difficult than it was. The programs you used were very user friendly which made learning for Kyrsha much more enjoyable.
There is nothing like working from home,; no lost days of education due to snow days, no distractions from other students. Virtual learning let my daughter move at her own pace, although you pushed her when she needed pushing. I was also very pleased with the fact that if she needed you for support your were readily available or it wasn’t long before you were. I can only hope next years experience …is as simple. We are looking forward to your continued support through these last 4 years of schooling.
I was also very pleased with the amount of growth Kyrsha was able to make. Again, this is another advantage to virtual learning. There is no box limiting my child, … no one moving on with out my child having mastered concepts.
I am so glad we made this move to virtual learning. It has been one of the best decisions I could have made for my child’s educational needs. We owe you many thanks and we are proud to be one of your first graduates.
Thank you again for everything Sherra Carr”
I want to share with you some quotes from inspired people in history and literature. These quotes have made me happy and given me something to think about. They have led me to decide to provide online education to children. I hope you will enjoy them as well.
“Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.” ⨖ Jim Rohn
“Education would be so much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they don’t know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.” ⨖ Sir William Haley
” Instruction ends in the school-room, but education ends only with life.⨠Frederick W. Robertson
How would Mr. Farley deal with this conundrum. He would have fewer number of scorers assessing a smaller number of students. He would place the assessment of the standardized tests back in the hands of the teacher who has the knowledge and ability to make decisions regarding responses of students that he or she already knows.
Washington recently put forth a comprehensive classroom- based assessment program (CBA) for social studies, health, and the arts. These exams were written and administered on the state level but the student results were assessed by classroom teachers. The CBA’s are based on student performance and/or portfolios that are produced over the year. Now, a student isn’t assessed on what they do in one stress-related day of testing but on the knowledge that they have accumulated over a period of time.
Race to the Top is based on national assessment criteria. This is set to become the method for federal education funding. If these assessments are not reformed, then we place the future of the student in the hands of hired temps who get only a fleeting glance at the students’ work.
How would that work for you? Could you pass based on a short one-day glimpse of your work? Would your really want your competency graded that way? I can only hope that you never have a bad day!
Todd Farley, author of Making the Grades: My Misadventures to the Standardized Testing Industry points out his major complaint with large -scaled assessments. It isn’t the multiple choice questions of standardized testing he finds issue with. They are scored electronically. The answer is clearly right or wrong. However, the open-ended test questions are much different. Those are scored by temporarily hired employees who have only a short training session to learn the industries scoring rules. After sitting through said training session, his stated opinion was that is was ” a theater of the absurd.”
A rubric or written guideline is developed for the scores to follow. However, if you were to scored a question and read that full; credit should be given to an answer that showed “complete understanding” would you know what that meant. It is no longer being scored objectively but subjectively according to the particular scorer. He talks of a wonderful example when potential answers were being evaluated and the group spent much time trying to determine if “bubbled” meant the same thing as “sizzled” or “fizzled”.