Three Years of Stanford University Tuition For $36,000?

Does this sound too good to be true? How about entering Stanford directly out of high school with three years worth of Stanford college credit under your belt?

I’m at the CETPA conference this week.   CETPA, the California Educational Technology Professional Association, has been meeting annually now for 46 years. Originally the organization served a school district staff that in many cases was far removed from the process of educating students. They were the employees that managed the mainframe computers and programmed in Cobalt from back offices far removed from the classrooms.  Times have changed and though there still is a strong contingency of folks that started in the IT world and then entered the K-12 education arena, there are almost as many, I would wager, that started in the classroom and moved into the K-12 IT arena.  All that’s beside the point for now…

You can get more info about the organization here if you are interested: http://www.cetpa-k12.org/

Now how can you attend Stanford for 3 years for only $36,000…?

As I was saying… the keynote today was presented by Alan November,  http://www.anovember.com/.
Mr. November has been around for quite some time on the presenter circuit at education conferences, himself a previous educator. He has a good message about what he thinks we need to do in terms of educating our students, i.e. teaching students the grammar of the Internet (Altavista:host, link:, etc. ) the tools for validating information; and  teaching students to be responsible users of these powerful communications tools., etc. etc., all extremely important and undeniable true and valid goals.

 However, one thing he mentioned, almost in passing, which I thought was the most significant part of his keynote for me, was the fact that Stanford University received a multi-million dollar grant to develop an online high school.  This is pretty much a done deal now and they are rolling it out.  See more about it here: http://epgy.stanford.edu/ohs/

What I think is significant about it is it will cost $12,000 a year for student to attend the Stanford University Online High School.  It is designed specifically for the gifted student population.  The curriculum is very rigorous, but the clincher for me was a student who graduates from the Stanford University Online High School can earn up to three years of Stanford University credit. 

 If you look at the long-term effect of something like this, what do you see?  If this is successful, do you think other Universities are going to jump on board with similar programs?  How do proponents of the school voucher idea fit in?  Is this going to widen the chasm between the tech literate and non-tech literate? What about those schools that are not teaching students the “grammar” of collaboration/technology/information?  Given the choice would you want to send your child to a high school like this?

 

I just got through listening to the keynote Dave Warlick gave (is giving) (will give) at the K12 Online Conference. Many of the things Mr. Warlick describes I have witnessed first hand with the student and teachers in a couple of our middle schools. A little more than a year ago and these teachers were lucky to be using technology to just check email. There was no technology in the classrooms. No fault of their own, but funding and professional development in how to use these tools was never made availabe to them. That was, up until last year, when we recieved a (USA) federal grant. The grant brought the tools and the professional development to support teachers in their journey of using these new tools.

To make a long story short, a conversation I was having with a science teacher this morning was both encouraging and at the same time a little troubling.  It was encouraging because this teacher was saying that at this point, he would never go back to teaching without technology. He said he has actually thrown out all his old handwritten notes, etc.  But at the same time, he expressed concern for how we will be able to sustain the use now that he's hooked. Projector bulbs, technical support, software upgrades, hardware upgrades, toner cartridges, all expenses that are also new to the school that did not have technology a year and a half ago. These middle schools do not have an overubundance of funding. They do well on standardized tests; they are not high percentage "free or reduced lunch program" sites; and they are not Title 1 funded. Funding is pretty tight.

If teachers get it, but the schools, or better yet the (educational) system doesn't get it, what are teachers left to do?  Teachers that are collaboraters, sharers of information, and technology literate may have to take things into their own hands. A lot has been said about charter schools playing by their own rules. Some of the charter schools have been successful while others have not been so successful. What would happen if individual teachers applied to be charter schools. Using technology to foster community...thought interupted...more to come...

 Okay, it's now the following morning, 8:17 am...

iSchool II  … Okay, maybe single teacher schools are not in the real near future. On the way into work there was a report on NPR about charter schools in Ohio and Washington DC that are not making the cut. They mentioned, something in the neighborhood of, 50 % of these schools are not doing a good job. Hmnmnm….

 

On the positive side that would mean 50% are doing a good job, and possibly helping students who may not have been getting help in the traditional, non-charter school environment.  I’m not a big proponent of charter schools, I work and grew up in public schools, every student that goes to a charter mean less funding for a public school (at least here in California where funding is based on ADA (Average Daily Attendance). 

 

My point is I have seen how teacher in a very short amount of time, with training and support, can go from not using technology, to feeling that they could not do as good a job without the technology. They have seen the light! They “get it.”  In addition, tools such as Moodle, Skype, Elluminate, and the abundance of all the free or low cost (Web 2.0) browser based applications are approaching the point where an educator with a solid background in modern instruction and content (standards) would have all the tools necessary to create their own mini-school.  If the traditional educational system does not change in terms of these new tools and its customers, and the teachers who are skilled in 21^st century education are not supported, what would stop a teacher from becoming their own school? An iSchool. 

 

 

Technorati Tags: k12online06 k12online

A teacher sent me an email this morning asking me to look at the logs for his Moodle site. Yesterday he started a forum on his site for the very first time. He had almost 2000 hits on his site yesterday, in one day! Granted some of theses hits are the same students going to different areas in his Moodle site, but that was still pretty impressive.

I hesitated to look at what the students were actually doing online in his Moodle site. I didn't want find out it was completely unrelated to what they were studying in class. However, when I checked out the forum Joe had started, in regards to the Diet Coke-Mentos experiment, I was pleasantly surprised to see some decent thinking going on as to what else might make Diet Coke take off like the Space Shuttle.  Granted these were not entries that would score on the district writing test, but that was not the point. There was some higher level thinking going on in these students' heads, and they were engaging each other in conversations related to their hypotheses and the scientific method.

For example, one student hypothesized what would happen if you put a Pez candy in a diet coke. The comments and responses other students contributed to this student's thread were in agreement that nothing would happen. One justification by a student was that Pez is covered with a waxy coating and would probably not interact with the Diet Coke.

Lots of good discussions related to classroom instruction all taking place outside of the classroom, on the students' own time, in a medium that they understand and relate to.

Lots of positives related to this type of activity.

- Essentially unlimited amount of time, to a discussion/topic that is interesting to students, but yet would never happen in a classroom for more than maybe a minute. (Too much to teach in 50 minutes to spend 20 minutes discussing the chemical reaction of different candy and Diet Coke.

- Provides an opportunity for students to contribute to a (online) conversation where in a classroom discussion they may not get that opportunity.

- Provides students with an opportunity to take as much time as they like to form an idea and express that idea. Again, this opportunity does not all ways occur in the classroom due to time restrictions.

- Some students may be more apt to participate in a discussion online, than they would in person, orally.

I'm sure there are others positives, but those are just a few off the top of my head.

Fans of the OpenSource tools: Drupal, Moodle, Elgg, OpenID, and MediaWiki may get some good news soon,  a new OpenSource start up hopes to bring integration between the five systems.  This means that with a single sign on, learners would have access to Drupal, Moodle, Elgg, and MediaWiki based on their set permission levels.

 The days of using your class web page to post a photo or two of yourself, some grades, a few web resources, and the week's homework assignments may be getting  a big boost. Now teachers and students will easily be able to post all the above, plus learning content, multimedia resources, blogs, develop wikis, assessments,  contribute to ePortfolios, store files, and communicate in a secure environment.

 To follow the development and the integration of these, check out their web site, OpenAcademic.org, http://openacademic.org/index.php 

There's been a lot of concerned discussions over the past week related to the latest patent awarded to Blackboard. Within a couple of days of being awarded the patent, they have gone on the offensive to defend their patent, first with the company  Desire2Learn Inc. 

 Around the world there is a grass roots effort to defend users of other LMS systems against this patent. One such effort is at Wikipedia where people are contributing to the History of virtual learning environments.

 Some see efforts by Blackboard to patent online learning as a last ditch effort to shore up the bottom line of a company who recently went through a very costly acquisition of WebCT. As posted on the Moodle boards, Tony Hursh writes, "It's interesting that Blackboard insiders have dumped over 4 million shares of the company in the past twelve months, while purchasing a mere 2,500 shares. These don't exactly seem like the actions of a management team that has a high degree of confidence in the long-term profitability of their company."

 How this will effect users of Moodle, and other Learning Management Systems is yet to be seen. 

 

In my school district we just began using Moodle in our middle school science and social studies classrooms last year. We were very excited about the results of it's use last year and are looking forward to expanding its use.

 The Third Annual MoodleMoot Conference has just finished at The Open University, Walton Hall Campus, in the United Kingdom this week. There are video podcasts and audio podcasts available of many of the presentions. Most of them are for higher education, but they are very relevant to K12 education too. (At least I like to think so.)

Martin Dougiamas, the founder and lead developer of Moodle, gave the keynote on Wednesday morning. He outlined some of the new features being developed and set for release in the next version.

 If you're interested in hearing some of these presentation, point your web browser to: http://stadium.open.ac.uk/berrill/ and click on the selections titled Moodle Moot Conference.

 Lots of great information! Oh, and the cost? Free!

If you're familiar with Inspiration software for visual diagramming and webbing, you may want to check out Cmap.  Cmap is a free tool for creating concept maps. It does primarily everything Inspiration does and a little more. The one disadvantage with CMap is you have to supply the clip art library. One thing that I like, and I'm excited to try is it's ability to allow real time collaboration. Imagine what kind of concept map lessons you could conduct in a 1:1 environment or a school lab environment. Oh, and did I mention it is FREE!

 For more information regarding CMap point your web browser to: http://cmap.ihmc.us/

 

Welcome to this Elgg installation.