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MCPS makes national Advanced Placement honor roll

November 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Missoula’s public school district offers AP classes at all four high schools – Big Sky, Hellgate, Sentinel and Seeley-Swan – as well as online through the Montana Digital Academy.

Brassfield said the online classes are fairly new and offer opportunities to students who didn’t have access to AP classes before.

Mark Thane, a regional director for the district, said offering advanced courses benefits students by providing more challenging work and preparing them for higher education.

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Bigfork offers online diploma option

October 31, 2011 By Leave a Comment

It all started four years ago, when a group of Bigfork High School staff members started meeting and brainstorming ideas of how to better serve students.

At the top of the list: offering a platform for students to explore the rapidly expanding realm of online education.

“We felt that it was important for us to be able to have that experience available to our students,” said Bigfork High School principal Matt Porrovecchio. “They’re likely going to have some form of online learning in college, so really, experiencing an online classroom is just as important as the actual content because it’s a skill in itself.”

In 2008, the school began offering electives through Virtual High School (VHS), a national program that offers a variety of courses on topics such as video game design, criminology and world religions. The school also offers a selection of Advanced Placement (AP) classes in more traditional subjects.

“We set out to find what we felt was the best program available, and that was VHS,” Porrovecchio said. “There are a lot of online programs out there that are more in the category of correspondence classes, and that’s not what we were shooting for. We wanted a platform that was as close to a traditional classroom as possible, where students were required to communicate with their instructors and their classmates on a regular basis.”

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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.

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Bigfork offers high school diploma online

October 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

There are no boundaries in the virtual world of learning and Bigfork High School is taking advantage of that through Bigfork Digital High School.

The school first offered online classes four years ago through Virtual High School, an international online consortium of instructors teaching specialized courses such as American Popular Music and Nuclear Physics.

Virtual High School expanded electives that would not be feasible to offer at the school. Participation has been popular: Students have taken 140 classes.

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Technology expands school offerings

August 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Though the district does have some students working with the Montana Digital Academy, for the last couple of years it has offered its own GFPS Virtual Academy to high-school and now some middle-school students.

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Great Falls schools embrace online teaching

August 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

As schools learn to adapt to education in a virtual age, students in the Great Falls school district have been given many opportunities to learn in an online environment.

Classes from two online programs, the state-funded Montana Digital Academy and the locally run Great Falls Public Schools Virtual Academy, are open to students throughout the district.

Valorie Oldfield, 18, who graduated from C.M. Russell High School this year, said her experience with online education has “definitely been positive,” despite having difficulty learning in an online language class.

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School board decides against holding levy

June 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

“We have a lot of new things that will be happening here with Laurie (Schiefer) going part-time and Casey coming in without having any superintendent experience,” Wing said. “He is a bright man, though, and I really think he’ll do well. He’ll just be really busy because he’s keeping all the IT work too.”

The district is saving $100,000 by not renewing the contracts of six teachers.

However, with that staff reduction the district lost its Spanish teacher and the middle school must offer a foreign language to keep its accreditation. To fix that problem the school is trying out the use of online classes through Montana Digital Academy.

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Virtual education boom hits the states

March 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Using the Internet allows poorer or more rural districts to have access to more specialized teachers without having to pay big incentives. And in some cases, it makes it possible for teachers to reach more students either in larger classrooms or at home, minimizing costs to school districts. An audit of Wisconsin’s virtual charter schools last year found the per-pupil costs of some of the schools were lower than those of traditional public schools, although they were higher in others because of high start-up costs.

Last year, Vermont and Montana launched their first state-run virtual schools, while Michigan and Massachusetts created full-time online programs. This year, Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman told lawmakers he wants to use $8.5 million in lottery funds to create an online high school to bring new courses to the state’s students. “In rural Nebraska, it can be difficult to hire foreign language, math and science teachers,” he said in a January speech. “A virtual high school would allow rural schools and rural communities to survive.”

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Great Falls Schools Embracing Online Learning

March 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment

For the first year, students at C.M.R High School have two options when it comes to online learning.

Classes from Montana Government to Spanish are now being offered through the school district and through the Montana Digital Academy.

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Troy on receiving end of distance learning grant

February 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The grant also includes development and training for staff on use of the equipment as well as integration of technology into current curriculum. The program is supported and maintained for three years to ensure sustainability throughout the length of the grant.

Troy students have utilized online resources already through the Montana Digital Academy and Flathead Valley Community College-Lincoln County Campus.

“Our high school principal indicated to the board last night that we have 17 students taking online courses for credit with a variety of things from French to digital photography to pharmacy tech,” Selle said. “The great thing is students can get a head start on their college education and get some required courses taken care of early on.”

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