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Virtual schools are in session

December 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Thirty states plus the District of Columbia have full-time online schools. And while those schools only educate about 200,000 students nationwide, that number is growing by about 25 percent each year. Florida opened one of the first online schools in 1997 and the Florida Virtual School is now the nation’s largest. California alone has 16 virtual schools.

In 2006, Michigan became the first state to make completion of at least one online class a high school graduation requirement. Since then, Alabama and Florida have followed. Reasons for attending a virtual school include physical disabilities or medical conditions, bullying problems at school, living in remote areas, or having caretaker or financial responsibilities at home.

Virtual schools also serve students whose careers in the arts or athletics make traditional school attendance impossible.

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Alachua eSchool coming to a screen near you

November 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Alachua County middle and high school students will be able to take classes with local teachers from their computer screen as part of the Alachua eSchool, a partnership between the school district and Florida Virtual School.

The Florida Virtual School allows each school district to create its own “franchise’’ in which the curriculum is the same as the virtual schools but all the personnel are local and paid by the school district.

According to the statewide online school, more than 28,368 Florida students were enrolled in franchise schools during the 2010-11 school year, more than 11,000 more students than the previous academic year.

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Virtual School

November 27, 2011 By Leave a Comment

There are a growing number of students in the U.S.  who’s “going to school” now means logging into computers anywhere they are located.

 

Virtual schools are now entrusted with the education of children as young as kindergarten as an estimated 1.5 million students participate in online education today. Florida, as well as many other states, has started to follow along with this trend.

Starting with the 2011-2012 school year, ninth graders will need to take an online class to be able to graduate. This new law comes after years of planning. In 1997, the state created Florida Virtual School as an Internet-based public high school. Now it is a state-wide school district, and offers classes from K-12. The Digital Learning Now Law was created to prepare children for a technology-based future, freeing them from classrooms.

Not everyone thinks this new law is such a great idea, but the Legislature did approve it.

“Many students who start off ninth grade already struggle enough trying to adjust to a new school and harder classes. Now they have to worry about getting home and taking another class, said Maria Movilla, a concerned mother. “I mean, they go to school for a reason.”

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Can Virtual Schools Really Replace Classrooms?

November 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The article reports that an estimated 250,000 students in 2010-11 attend school online, sometimes in the form of full-time public cyberschools, sometimes in a cyber “hybrid” school. These children aren’t “home schooled” from a statistical point of view; they’re enrolled in schools with names that sound like online degree factories (Georgia Cyber Academy, Florida Virtual School), but are legitimately run by states and districts or outsourced to for-profit corporations. They’re going to school. At home.

A quarter-million kids represent a tiny percentage of the 56 million kindergartners through 12th graders in the United States, but it’s a percentage that’s growing, according to The Journal’s numbers: up 40 percent in the last three years. It’s that increase, rather than the actual number of students affected, that makes these virtual schools worth talking about, and it’s an increase not just in children and parents willing to embrace this, but also in school districts. Georgia and Florida both say they spend substantially less on a student in their online schools. An Idaho school superintendent told The Journal that he was considering closing entire departments and outsourcing their courses to online providers. “It’s not ideal,” he said, “but Idaho is in a budget crisis, and this is a creative solution.”

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The Nation: America’s Online Learning Curve

November 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Lee Fang, formerly a blogger who covered lobbying and conservative movements with ThinkProgress.org, is an investigative reporter.

This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

If the national movement to “reform” public education through vouchers, charters and privatization has a laboratory, it is Florida. It was one of the first states to undertake a program of “virtual schools”—charters operated online, with teachers instructing students over the Internet—as well as one of the first to use vouchers to channel taxpayer money to charter schools run by for-profits.

But as recently as last year, the radical change envisioned by school reformers still seemed far off, even there. With some of the movement’s cherished ideas on the table, Florida Republicans, once known for championing extreme education laws, seemed to recoil from the fight. SB 2262, a bill to allow the creation of private virtual charters, vastly expanding the Florida Virtual School program, languished and died in committee. Charlie Crist, then the Republican governor, vetoed a bill to eliminate teacher tenure. The move, seen as a political offering to the teachers unions, disheartened privatization reform advocates. At one point, the GOP’s budget proposal even suggested a cut for state aid going to virtual school programs.

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Home schooling increases in Volusia, Flagler counties

November 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The Greer twins were less than halfway through first grade when Hunter’s growing frustration with learning to read caught their parents’ attention.

Charlene and Kurt Greer talked to his teacher and tried to help at home before asking that Hunter be tested to see if something was getting in the way of his progress.

Their request denied, the Greers soon pulled both boys out of their North Carolina school. Charlene Greer — a certified teacher — took over their education. Private testing later confirmed Hunter has dyslexia, a learning disability that makes reading more difficult.

He and his brother Gunnar, who now live in Ormond Beach, are 15 and in their first year of high school. Their mother still oversees their education at home although they depend primarily on Florida Virtual School online courses for the curriculum.

The twins are among a growing number of home-schooled students in Volusia and Flagler counties, a trend that reflects what’s happening across Florida and around the nation.

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Study finds flaws in virtual education

October 31, 2011 By Leave a Comment

A new study is sounding alarms at the quick expansion of virtual education programs in states like Florida, saying for-profit companies are pushing states to offer full-time virtual instruction paid for by state tax dollars with little research on the quality of these programs.

The study, written by two professors at the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and released Tuesday, highlights a number of emerging problems with the growth of online learning.

Serious questions

The study raises questions about the quality of virtual education, such as the lack of supervision, as well as the financial motivations of for-profit companies that have pushed state legislatures to expand virtual instruction.

“Private corporations, most of which are for-profit, have recognized a huge potential market in virtual schooling,” wrote the study’s authors, who urge states to more closely examine how much they pay for virtual instruction.

Florida has long been at the forefront of virtual education. There is the state-backed Florida Virtual School, which offers full-time and part-time virtual classes paid for by taxpayer dollars and each school district in the state is required to offer virtual classes, either through its own program, the Florida Virtual School, or private companies.

And this year, a new state law requires all public high school students to take an online course prior to graduation as well as allow charter schools to offer full-time “virtual” classes.

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Virtual Schools Offer PD Programs for E-Teaching

October 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Because schools of education, with a few exceptions, have been slow to offer programs to develop virtual instructors, many of the nation’s leading online schools have, for more than a decade, crafted homegrown online and blended professional development.

And with the flexibility offered by the online classroom, instructors who also have face-to-face experience sometimes say the continuous, embedded professional development now in vogue is easier to achieve—be it in collaboration with colleagues, correspondence with advisers, or participation in supplemental education—in an online setting.

So it’s perhaps not surprising that, as more instructors from brick-and-mortar schools are seeking professional development online, virtual schools are exploring how to become providers to teachers as well as students.

“I think, really, we’re going to see us reaching out into more markets,” said Mary Mitchell, the director of professional learning at the 123,000-student Florida Virtual School, or FLVS, which is based in Orlando. “It doesn’t just have to be for virtual teachers, but it’s virtual, and it’s cost-effective. It can be entire districts, entire states.”

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States, Districts Move to Require Virtual Classes

October 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The company is also offering the families enrolled a “netbook-style laptop” for $150, access to free digital-literacy training, and free Internet-security software. However, the program would only aid students who qualify and who are in the Comcast service area.

In Florida, which is kicking off its own statewide requirement for an online-learning credit with this year’s freshman class, there’s no shortage of online options, says Mary Jane Tappen, the deputy chancellor for K-12 curriculum, instruction, and student services for the Florida Department of Education. The state boasts the nation’s largest online school, the Florida Virtual School, which served 122,000 students during the 2010-11 school year, and individual districts in the state often offer their own virtual courses as well.

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Feds Investigate Teen After Explosive Materials Scare At Ibis

October 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — A tip from a pool supply company led police and FBI agents to a home on Osprey Trace in the Ibis community, said Richard Springer.

He is a Palm Springs attorney who represents Martin Morgenroth, 18. Springer said Morgenroth purchased three chemicals that aroused workers’ suspicions at the pool supply store.

“I think it was extra strength hydrogen peroxide, which I didn’t know existed, acetone and hydrochloric acid,” Springer said, adding that Morgenroth and his mother were asked to consent that the home be searched. Springer said he advised against it.

Once a search warrant was obtained, law enforcement officers trained in explosives were concerned.

“The difficulty they had last Friday was the bomb experts that participated in the search warrant weren’t sure how volatile the substance was, which is why they evacuated the neighborhood,” Springer said.

Property records show Margaret O’Shaughnessy has owned the home for years. Morgenroth has a Facebook account that says he attended FLVS, which is an acronym for Florida Virtual School.

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