Friday, March 21, 2008
Slow Start, but Ready to GO
For assorted understandable reasons, I just had the opportunity to communicate with the teacher I am working with. So now I am playing catch-up, but wow. I have been looking around the virtual school I am observing to see how everything seems to work and what tools are available. While I was waiting to actually talk with my teacher I started looking around for articles on virtual schools and wanted to find information on the good and bad. I found an news article http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2003/10/08/loc_virtualschool08.html that discusses the initial problems a different virutal school has had and what changes they have made in order to build a successful program. The school discussed uses virtual school similar to the program being used in my traditional high school. A program that has the students in a classroom/computer lab with a teacher present, but where the students work in virtual classrooms.
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4 comments:
The article points out a good definition of some of the types of students who might do well in a virtual school: At-risk students, high-achieving students, or those who don't fit into a regular school because of jobs, families, social issues or boredom. I would add students with special needs, students who have experienced health issues (I have a student in my regular school who is being treated for leukemia, and is completing her junior year online, even though we are not a virtual school), or students who are training to be professional athletes or actors (my school had a boy training for a professional golf career, and a girl training part-time in California for a singing career-we tried to accomodate them as well.)
It would be interesting to find out if the virtual school we are observing had similar challenges in the beginning.
In reading the article referenced in your post, the quote that really resonated with me was "schools were more cliquish than they are here ... It's not like I was a troublemaker, I just had trouble finding a group to stick around with."(Anglan, 2003). My thoughts turned from the success of the curriculum to the social aspect of virtual schooling - or lack thereof. I feel slightly concerned about this particular student having the social skills to cope in the corporate world once he graduates from high school and more specifically college. Having virtual recess like the one described at "Virtual Science Classroom" eases my mind in this regard. Did you have any thoughts about that when you read the article?
References
Anglan, R. (2003). Online school keeps kids in line. The Cinncinnati Enquirer. Retrieved March 23, 2008, from: www.enquirer.com
One of the things that I think is extremely beneficial to the virtual school programs is the ability to reevaluate when things aren't working and furthermore they have the ability to make changes more easily than the traditional school. In virtual schools, such as the one we are observing, the set-up is more so that of business and is based on student performance. This model allows the school and its leadership to make adjustments as necessary in areas that are more difficult in the traditional school, such as personnel and curriculum.
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