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MCPS makes national Advanced Placement honor roll
November 29, 2011 By admin 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 admin 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 admin 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
