Don’t underestimate yourself. It’s advice that every educator has provided to students at one time or another. Yet this time it came from Jillian Conrad, an incoming senior at Jeffco’s 21st Century Virtual Academy in Golden, CO, outside Denver, who was speaking as a panelist at a session at the recent International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference. The panel also included another student, Britnee Osteen, as well as Judy Bauernschmidt, director of student online learning at the academy.

Conrad’s comment was in response to a question from Julie Evans, CEO of the nonprofit education group Project Tomorrow, which co-hosted the session along with e-learning solutions provider Blackboard. Evans asked the panelists what advice they would give to the educators in the audience. Conrad opened with, “Don’t be afraid to engage with the younger generation because of the gap in knowledge about technology. Don’t underestimate yourself.”

For the rest of the article, go to In the Company of Sages

As valedictorian of his senior high school class, Jed Michal was naturally expected to give the commencement speech during the graduation ceremonies of his East Colorado high school. Though stuck in a Texas hospital a week out from a bone marrow transplant for leukemia–a disease that had robbed him of his entire junior year at Flagler High School in Flagler, CO–he was able to deliver that once-in-a-lifetime address thanks to videoconferencing technology implemented by his district’s regional co-op.

Michal’s alma mater is in one of the most sparsely populated areas of the United States. The East Central Board of Cooperative Educational Services (EC BOCES) governs 15,000 square miles with 21 K-12 school districts, most with only a few hundred students total. Vast geography and declining populations were perilous to many smaller schools and presented challenges for the responsible co-op.

Keeping Schools Alive and Meeting College Requirements
“These are very small districts, and only a couple of them actually have more than one building,” said Emma Richardson, distance learning coordinator for EC BOCES. Leaders there eventually determined that videoconferencing was the only way to keep delivering a variety of quality classes to all the schools in need. The resulting initiative, the Video Networking Educational Technology System (VNETS), connected 17 participating districts with each other and with world at large via videoconferencing technologies.

For the rest of the article, go to Virtual Learning to the Rescue

Provost Academy, Colorado’s new online public high school will provide an opportunity for students and parents to meet with teachers and advisors prior to the start of the new school year on Tuesday, July 20. The event, to be held at the Provost Academy office – 7730 E. Belleview Ave., Suite AG-9, Greenwood Village – will provide interested students and parents a full demonstration of the school’s unique learning experience, which combines a rigorous curriculum with a high-touch approach.

Where & When:

Provost Academy Student and Parent Night
Tuesday, July 20 – 6 to 8 p.m.
7730 E. Belleview Ave., Suite AG-9
Greenwood Village, Colorado

“We are excited to share with students and parents a total hands-on opportunity to see and experience for themselves what Provost Academy can offer in the way of an education option,” said Audie Rubin, Provost Academy Executive Director. “They will find that at Provost Academy, the students will be challenged on a level developed for them.”

For the rest of the article, go to Provost Academy Colorado Student and Parent Night Will Open Doors to Online Learning

The for-profit e-learning company K12 Inc. grew 40 percent last year, generating $385 million in revenue by providing virtual courses to 70,000 students across the country. Connections Academy, another such provider, generated about $120 million in revenue serving up online courses to some 20,000 students. And last month, the education technology company PLATO Learning announced that it is now offering online Advanced Placement courses, marking the first time the company will do so as part of its courseware for school districts.

Experts say for-profit providers of online courses—long seen as an option for home-schoolers and a potential rival to public schools—are breaking into the public education mainstream as more schools mix face-to-face classes and online courses to expand their curricular offerings. With demand for that “blended” approach expected to grow, other players in the online-coursetaking marketplace, such as Apex Learning, Aventa Learning, Compass Learning, and Kaplan Virtual Education, are also seeking business in public schools.

For the rest of the article, go to E-Education Inc. Seeks the Mainstream

Colorado Connections Academy

Denver, CO – June 14, 2010 – When parents and students are considering online high schools, they’ll find a number of choices, both private and public. The private schools may stress their high-quality curriculum but often charge high tuition. Public online schools are free but may not provide the best academics or student support. Is there a third choice? Yes. A new education option that combines the best of all online school options is now being offered in Colorado.

At Provost Academy, Student Success is Key

Provost Academy is a free public online Colorado high school whose mission is to ensure that students are successful in their courses and that they master the knowledge necessary to provide them the greatest opportunities in their careers or college studies. For students and families who are seeking a challenging curriculum in a non-traditional, flexible environment, this new online high school may be the perfect choice.

For the rest of the article, go to Provost Academy Stands Out Among Online High Schools for Focus on Student Success.

DENVER, June 28 /PRNewswire/ — Educators make up the majority of the membership of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE®), but students were a primary focus at the education technology conference and exposition ISTE 2010. The initiatives geared toward students included a program with The Denver Post in which a group of young journalists served as special correspondents for the newspaper and also contributed to The Daily Leader, ISTE’s newspaper published throughout the conference, and the ISTE Connects blog.

ISTE 2010 attracted other groups of students who attended and participated in an array of different hands-on activities, including a group of students involved in the robotic arena.

“Robotics is a hands-on, tangible science that teaches students how to be part of a team and solve theoretical problems,” said Vignesn Muralidharan, recent graduate of Fairview High School in Boulder, Colo. “In school, you work solo, but with robotics, you work as a team.”

Along with speakers, workshops and discussions, the conference pushed new boundaries in social media, virtual learning environments and other exciting new forums for K-12 classrooms.

For the rest of the article, go to Students Tell the Story at ISTE 2010

Online learning is spreading quickly in U.S. schools, with 27 percent of high school students saying they were enrolled in at least one online course in 2009, nearly double the 14 percent enrolled in 2008, according a newly released update to a 2007 study.

Further, online learning appears to run in the family, according to the report released by Blackboard K-12 and Project Tomorrow at the ISTE 2010 ed-tech conference Tuesday morning. Students with a parent who had taken an online course were twice as likely to take or explore taking their own virtual course. And more parents than ever—33 percent—reported having enrolled in an online course for work or pleasure.

“I think that that’s just a little piece of something bigger that’s going on,” said Jessie Woolley-Wilson, Blackboard K-12 president, who suggested that parents’ interest could be sparked by students’ online courses. “The archetypes … are changing. Teachers are students. Students are teachers. And so our notion of a linear learning curve that is completely dictated by your age and by your grade and all this stuff, it all blows up.”

But while students, parents, teachers and administrators all appear to be more open to online learning, the infrastructure to accommodate that demand is still evolving—and at this point still falling short, the survey finds.

For the rest of the article, go to Tracking E-Learning Growth