A group of enterprising Internet educators have been waiting a year to give Georgia public school students and teachers the state’s first virtual K-12 experience – the chance to work and learn from home in their slippers full-time. Friday, they get an answer.

The Georgia Charter Schools Commission months ago delayed a vote on petitions for five new cyber campuses so that board members could investigate the idea and its impact on public school funding. The questions: Can virtual charters serve students well? How do you make the schools accountable for students they may never see in person? Are costs to provide kids with home computers and Internet connections comparable to providing them with traditional classrooms?

“We don’t really have a benchmark,” said Mark Peevy, the commission’s executive director. “We were working hard to establish what we hope is the right funding level to make it worthwhile for these schools to operate while balancing taxpayer dollars. We need to make sure we are not building in a profit-base unnecessarily.”

After researching the rise of virtual charter schools nationally and talking money with the staff of Gov. Sonny Perdue, the commissioner on Friday will announce which schools the state will approve.

The State Department of Education has already recommended the approval of two of five proposed statewide virtual charter schools — Kaplan Academy of Georgia and Provost Academy Georgia — but more charters could be granted.

For the rest of the article, go to Pajamas uniform of choice: Virtual schools first to offer K-12 education

The Virginia-based K-12 Inc. will launch a charter school this fall that will require students to do half of their schoolwork over the Internet. The other half of instruction time will be spent with registered teachers in rented classroom space across the state.

Tim Wood, director of the GVSU Charter Schools Office, said the school will have administrative offices in Grand Rapids and Oakland County.

The sites of the learning centers have not been determined.

“We don’t have sites set up,” said Jeff Kwitowski, vice president for public relations at K-12 Inc. “We’re still looking at partnering with some community colleges/universities, similar to what we’ve done in Chicago with some success.”

Kwitowski called his organization “the state’s first virtual charter school institution.”

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“We’re excited about this opportunity to partner with the United States Air Force Academy to help them creatively teach prospective students what the academy can offer them,” says Andrew Hughes, president of Designing Digitally, Inc.

Within the virtual world, students can walk freely through the campus, sign up for scheduled events and tours or play games to learn more about the academy. Along the way, admissions representatives are available to answer any questions, so students can make the most of their tour.

Understanding that even in the Air Force, there’s room for fun and games, Designing Digitally, Inc. included eight games in the virtual world design and many other interactive features to make the tour engaging and informative. Features include:

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Dr. Trombetta attended the Apple Education Leadership Summit 2010 in Dallas, Texas, April 21-23.

“We attended the summit to begin a conversation with Apple about educational uses for the iPad,” said Dr. Trombetta. PA Cyber administrators have begun to experiment with the iPad and to look at apps – customized applications – that could put educational resources literally at a student’s fingertips. No iPads have yet been placed with students.

PA Cyber is uniquely positioned to experiment with the iPad because the school’s size, flexibility, experience and culture allows it to adapt more quickly than traditional schools to new educational methods and advances in technology, said Dr. Trombetta.

Dr. Trombetta said PA Cyber, like Apple, is a leader and innovator. The first statewide K-12 public cyber charter school in Pennsylvania, PA Cyber in its 10 years of existence has pioneered online educational methods, systems and the use of new technology. For instance, the school has converted nearly 100 percent to customized consumable textbooks that students keep, saving staff time and shipping expense while encouraging textbook content to be continually updated.

Downloadable digital versions of textbooks for more than 150 PA Cyber online courses – about two-thirds of the school’s course catalog – already have been created, though at this time PA Cyber has chosen to continue providing printed textbooks, according to Dr. Trombetta. Downloadable to a student laptop computer or mobile devices such as the iPad, digital versions of both custom and standard textbooks are available through arrangements such as per-student license agreements with publishers.

“The iPad already contains a lot of the technology we use now to deliver instruction, along with other innovative features which could help students to learn,” said Dr. Trombetta. He said PA Cyber staff will meet soon with Apple representatives to continue the school’s look at the iPad.

Released by the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) and supported by Microsoft Corp., the survey found fewer than one-fourth of U.S. teachers have spent more than six hours on any kind of professional development related to cyber ethics, safety, or security within the last 12 months.

More than half of teachers reported their school districts do not require these subjects as part of the K-12 curriculum, and only 35 percent said they’ve taught proper online conduct to their students.

Despite the lack of training and consistent teaching of internet safety, the survey shows that America’s teachers, school administrators, and technology coordinators strongly agree that cyber ethics, safety, and security should be taught in schools.

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For the rest: http://www.eschoolnews.com/2010/02/26/study-too-few-schools-are-teaching-cyber-safety/

With partnerships with several companies and organizations prolific in producing educational video content, including PBS, Pearson Education, and BBC Worldwide, Discovery Education streaming offers a topic- and keyword- searchable library of more than 9,000 video titles and 70,000 clips.

“NCVPS is committed to raising achievement and closing learning gaps for all North Carolina students by leveraging the power of world class e-learning opportunities,” said Bryan Setser, executive director of NCVPS.  “Allowing our educators and students to access digital content from Discovery Education is yet another way in which we are working toward producing successful 21st century learners, professionals and leaders.”

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http://thejournal.com/articles/2010/02/16/nc-virtual-school-offers-statewide-access-to-streaming-digital-content.aspx

But much of the $650 million in stimulus funding for Enhancing Education Through Technology—the federal government’s main educational technology program—has yet to trickle down to districts. Some schools instead are looking to other pots of money in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the 2009 stimulus law, to shore up their technology investments more quickly.

A handful of programs that received money through the recovery act allow districts to get creative about how to pay for technology, said Douglas A. Levin, the executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association

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From EdWeek.org

The three-and-a-half-year court battle between learning management system (LMS) giant Blackboard Inc. and competitor Desire2Learn ended Dec. 15 when the companies agreed to license each other’s patents and drop long-standing lawsuits. But some observers believe the truce comes too late to stem the growing movement toward open LMS technologies in higher education.

The protracted legal clash began in 2006 when Blackboard–the market’s No. 1 commercial LMS–received a patent for online learning systems widely considered to be too broad.

Blackboard sued its biggest rival, Desire2Learn, for patent infringement, and the companies went back and forth until last July, when a federal appeals court voided part of the Blackboard patent.

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“It’s an incredible honor to be selected for the iNACOL Best and Most Innovative Online Learning Practice award,” said Stace Wills, Elluminate’s Fire and Ice Global Coordinator. “It validates the tremendous impact that collaboration technologies (such as Elluminate Live!) and school-to-school collaboration projects (like Fire and Ice) can have on development, particularly in rural and remote areas restricted by bandwidth limitations and unstable internet connections.”

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Elluminate’s Fire and Ice Project Recognized as First-Ever iNACOL Award Winner for Best and Most Innovative Online Learning Practice

From Businesswire.com

But they’ll do it all without ever leaving their Chesapeake High School classroom–they will be using a three-dimensional Virtual Learning Environment developed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) with the university’s Center for Technology Education.

A coalition that also included Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and the University of Baltimore is deploying the environment, which was modeled after a state-of-the-art, 3-D visualization facility at APL that was used for projects by the Department of Defense and NASA. The Virtual Learning Environment is the first of its kind in the nation, said Baltimore County Superintendent Joe Hairston.

For the rest of the article, click here.

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Virtual 3D lab aims to stimulate learning by Maya T. Prabhu

From eSchoolNews.com