eLearning Update: Online Learning in Tennessee

The Effective Engaging E-learning Environment for Tennessee, or e4TN, held its 4th annual conference last month, gathering educators from across the state to talk about how to improve and sustain online learning.

The grant-funded e4TN program was created in 2006 to develop courses for high school students in Tennessee. Currently, the curriculum consists of 25 courses, including a new physics course first made available in Fall 2010. Also, e4TN provides e-education professional development opportunities for teachers, such as their two-day annual conference.

In four years, the program has evolved from a base of two educators in one district to a state-wide organization serving 64 districts in Tennessee, mirroring the exponential increase of online learning throughout the country and speaking to the wide-spread demand for online learning in Tennessee.

"We've seen exploding growth in funded districts," said Wendy Oliver, the e4TN coordinator, in a press release. She attributed this growth in part to the work of Timothy Webb, Tennessee's Commissioner of Education, who appropriated federal stimulus funding for state-wide online learning.

eLearning Update: The Rise of Credit Recovery

For those of you keeping up with the latest developments in online learning, my colleague Mary Ann Zehr's story about online credit-recovery programs is a must-read. New York City, Chicago, and Boston have embraced online credit recovery classes, which allow students to re-take courses online they may have failed instead of in a face-to-face classroom. It is, indeed, one of the fastest growing segments of the online learning industry.

Still, one of the biggest hurdles to online credit recovery, and online learning in general, are state policies that require students to complete a certain number of hours, or "seat-time" in each course. Online learning advocates are urging state policy makers to move to a proficiency-based, rather than time-based way of earning credits, but not all states have embraced this shift, Zehr reports.

In her story, Zehr points out that there isn't much independent research out there about the efficacy of online credit recovery programs. In fact, the researchers in her story could not point to any studies of online credit recovery specifically. But that doesn't seem to be stopping the growth of such programs, which are growing in large school districts across the country.

Despite the support from school districts that online recovery programs are receiving, if you scroll down to the comments of the story, you'll find several skeptics who warn against using online credit recovery to help students graduate. Commenter cossondra writes, "Unless the student who was unmotivated to succeed in a traditional setting brings a newfound personal motivation to the program, independent online learning will be even less likely to produce success than a classroom experience where other students as well as a personal teacher are there to guide and motivate."

Check out the story, and weigh in with your own comments here.

Building K-12 Cyber Leaders

The Consortium for School Networking, or CoSN, released Wednesday an updated guide aimed at improving superintendents' technology leadership, echoing the sentiments of others in ed-tech that strong leadership is crucial to strong technology integration.

The revised version of the Empowering the 21st Century Superintendent Toolkit refreshes guidelines CoSN released in 2008 to "help superintendents build their knowledge and skills to become more effective, visionary technology leaders," says a release from the national ed-tech advocates.

CoSN's update provides superintendents with assessments to help evaluate how ready they and their administrators are to lead technology initiatives, and identifies five leadership priorities. I read them as suggesting an order of operations, but they could also stand independently.

The five themes are as follows:

1. Utilize technologies that allow yourself and other district administrators to strengthen leadership and communication.
2. Understand the technology demands of the modern workplace and basic citizenship.
3. Use technology not to change, but to expand the array of teaching methods made available to students.
4. Emphasize professional development to improve staff technology skills, even those of administrators and superintendents.
5. Monitor and adapt to emerging trends in technology, such as balanced assessments, and be willing to develop expertise in those areas.

While teachers and other faculty may lead piece-meal classroom integration regardless of district leadership, superintendents are crucial for fostering an environment that is receptive to technology integration, CoSN leaders said in the release.

"Technology leadership has to start at the top," said Chip Kimball, chairman of the advisory council for CoSN's Empowering the 21st Century Superintendent initiative and a superintendent in Washington state. "Technology leadership has to be an intentional undertaking with specific district-wide goals, and superintendents are in a position to lead the way in achieving this."

Based on what I have seen, many teachers and technology officers echo Kimball's claim and are quick to credit superintendents who have led their districts forward. Researchers are also noting superintendents' importance. In a meeting at the ISTE 2010 ed-tech conference last week, Blackboard K-12 President Jessie Woolley-Wilson said getting superintendents to think proactively, rather than reactively, about ed-tech was among the biggest challenges to expanding online learning.

Coalition Calls for Modernizing COPPA

A coalition of child health, consumer, and privacy advocates submitted formal documents to the Federal Trade Commission last week recommending modernizations to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, which essentially restricts websites from collecting data on children under 13 without parental consent.

Suggestions include using criteria the FTC developed in 2008 for food marketing to clarify the definition of sites and content "directed at children," updating the definition of "personal information" to reflect how Web addresses, geographic location data, and even age and zip code can be used to target young online users, and creating a separate set of privacy protections for children 13 and older.

Protections for older adolescents, said the coalition in a release, should not include the parental consent model used in the current law that protects younger children.

It's unclear the effect the proposed reforms would have on online or blended learning programs. Most online education programs have pretty rigid parental consent stipulations already, but commercial vendors who provide online content or services to school districts may have to make revisions to their products to align with COPPA standards. For example, in a story I wrote about districts that were paying to equip school buses with WiFi Internet, one company that wired buses had to create an Internet filtering system to comply with COPPA standards.

Nobody is questioning the spirit of the COPPA. But in cyberspace terms, the law passed in 1998 and enacted in 2000 is ancient. When it was finally enacted, we were still four years away from Facebook and six from Twitter. And using phone services to connect to the Internet meant hooking your computer to a land line and a dial-up modem, not exploring the Web from a mobile device.

The FTC had already launched a review of the rules this spring, "in light of the rapidly evolving technology and changes in the way children use and access the Internet." After a recent extension of the review period, it is scheduled to end next Monday.

Making Sense of Digital Literacy Education

'Time for a Revolution'

"We're way past reform," said Jeff Piontek, the head of school at the Hawaii Technology Academy, in his closing keynote speech at the ISTE conference in Denver. "It's time for a revolution in education."

The former science educator and head of the state-sponsored charter school spoke to a packed auditorium on the final day of the conference about the importance of following your passion and infusing creativity and innovation into the STEM subjects. In fact, he recommended changing the well-known acronym, which refers to the subjects of science, technology, engineering, and math, to STEAM, the extra "A" referring to the arts, an idea that elicited applause from the audience.

"It's creativity and innovation that's going to drive our economy," said Piontek, criticizing the standardized tests that he said stifled learning and creativity in public schools across the country. Standardized tests "are not a true gauge of student learning," he said. "We need to think about how we actually assess students on a larger scale."

Educators must give students the technological tools and resources they need to become competent global citizens, said Piontek. Teachers must learn to guide students with content and curriculum and trust that the students will know how to use the tools, he said. "When you're in a classroom, you have to know that the culture you're teaching is not your own," he said, referring to the gap between those who have grown up using digital tools and those who have not.

Piontek's comments echoed most of the panelists, speakers, researchers, and educators I heard from here at the ISTE conference this year. Rethinking the way students are taught and assessed, using technology to support learning, and supplying students with the tools and resources they need to learn through real-world projects is a sentiment that prevailed throughout the conference, and one that Piontek encouraged educators to take with them when they return to their schools throughout the country and the world.

NYC iSchool Shares Its Ed-Tech Vision

To break out of "systemic failure," educators must rethink basic assumptions of what schools should look like, said Alisa Berger, a co-principal of the NYC iSchool, a new small high school that opened in New York City in 2008.

The school, which started with a class of 100, incorporates a heavy dose of technology into the classroom, but both Berger and her co-principal Mary Moss emphasized that technology be used as a tool to support teachers and students, rather than the focus of the curriculum. More importantly, technology helps the students and teachers at the iSchool engage in meaningful, interdisciplinary, real-world projects, said Berger and May at a session at the ISTE conference here in Denver.

For example, students at the school used tech tools to engage in conversations with students in London, Afghanistan, and Israel to talk about the September 11 terrorist attacks and their impact on world affairs, said Berger.

That project demonstrates the emphasis on interdisciplinary studies that both Moss and Berger said was a key element of the structuring of the new school. Each class students take fulfills credits in multiple content areas, rather than just one.

Another example Berger mentioned was having students design a green roof for their school. Using environmental science and engineering skills, students created several proposals that they then pitched to companies in order to secure funding for the project. After receiving feedback from the companies, students then came up with a final version.

To keep up with the demands of state standardized tests, students at the NYC iSchool take online classes, which allow them to move at their own pace, spending more time on the concepts they struggle with and allowing them to bypass areas where they are already proficient. That strategy has allowed many of the school's students to pass state exams normally given in 11th and 12th grade, which teachers at the school hope will free up student schedules in their final two years to take classes that they are most interested in.

Finally, encouraging students to take ownership of their learning and reflect on what they're interested in and what learning methods work best for them is a key element to the success of the school, said Moss and Berger. To help create a student-centered environment, each student is assigned an advisor, with whom the student meets at the end of each grading period to discuss his or her performance. In addition, students get new schedules every nine weeks, and they get to choose and rank which courses they'd most like to take. The school provides ample opportunities for feedback and reflection, which help inform students, teachers, and administrators as to what's working and what's not.

Cloud Use Dissipating? Not Likely

At Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, teachers use the Google Docs cloud application to comply with federal programs, compile surveys, report data, and check out and return equipment.

And with all that information published to a shared online location accessible from anywhere, Nashville professional development specialist Richard Alcantar says it's natural to raise security concerns.

But those worries should drive districts to think about how they choose to use cloud software rather than whether to use it, Alcantar said Wednesday at a session at the ISTE 2010 conference in Denver. Because the potential benefits of saved time, money and resources are too great to ignore.

"Don't say I can't have confidential information out there in the cloud," Alcantar said. "If you know [the risks], you can set up protocols and processes and rules to minimize them."

Alcantar said schools should consider using cloud software for a robust variety of school functions, like filling out payroll and attendance forms, registering students for activities, and submitting public address announcements. That eliminates both the overuse of paper and the time it takes for a document or e-mail to flow from one desk to the next.

To be cost effective, Alcantar suggested using more nuanced software for sensitive data that may include teacher or student identification information, but basic free software for information that would, by law, be public record. That may ease safety concerns of information technology specialists who worry about data corruption or identity theft.

"Whether IT wants it to happen or not, it's going to happen," Alcantar said of the continuing move toward cloud applications in schools. "These changes are too big, they're not going to stop them. But we need to know their concerns are legitimate, and we need to listen."

With co-operation and persistence, even large districts like Nashville, with 76,000 students, can implement effective cloud practices, he said.

"I work in a huge district that's incredibly bureaucratic," Alcantar said to conference-goers. "The hierarchy is thick and we're still able to get some of this done. So you can do it too."

Raising a Generation of Digital Citizens

Digital citizenship is a multi-faceted and essential piece of student curriculum, says Mike Ribble, the district director of technology for the Manhattan-Ogden school district in Kansas and author of multiple books on the subject.

Teaching kids to be responsible digital citizens goes beyond just talking about cyberbullying, Ribble explained in a session here at the ISTE conference in Denver. It also includes subjects like sexting, texting while driving, illegal downloading, and understanding what's OK to share and what information should remain private. "We have so much technology, but do we use the tool between our ears?" Ribble asked. Considering how young kids are when they start encountering technology, the conversations need to start at home, said Ribble, but there's a big role for educators, as well, in teaching students how to be ethical and responsible users of technology both in and out of school.

One way to prepare students to be good digital citizens is to start scaffolding the curriculum into subject areas, said Ribble. He proposed starting by talking with kindergarteners about digital communication, reaching digital rights and responsibilities by 4th grade, and even dealing with issues of digital commerce by the time students leave middle school. All the subjects in the scaffolded curriculum should be touched on each year, but by focusing on one area per year, students can begin to dig into the more complex subjects at appropriate times, says Ribble.

For further reading, Ribble recommended the report "Youth Safety on a Living Internet," written by the Online Safety and Technology Working Group. Also, parents may find resources about how to talk to their children about digital citizenship at the DigiParent social-networking site.

Citing the Real Author, Not Mr. Google

Putting its stamp on another hot topic at the ISTE 2010 ed-tech conference in Denver, the International Society for Technology in Education on Wednesday explained an evolving web-literacy curriculum developed with Microsoft and gathered feedback from conference-goers.

Critical Thinking In the Classroom focuses on teaching students to be responsible cyber researchers. The lessons, which can be downloaded for free, are available at three ability levels and are broken into five units: the mechanics of searching, validity and reliability, plagiarism, citing Web sources, and civil discourse.

Chris O'Neal, the ISTE faculty member who collaborated on the curriculum, said the program is aimed at changing the habits of students who have a quick Internet trigger, but not a natural skepticism of what they find on the other end of the search field barrel or an awareness of where it comes from. Some younger students, he said, even think everything they find on a search engine is the search engine's own content.

"We asked [students], 'Would you make life decisions based on the first [Web] page that comes up?'" O'Neal said. "And some kids really said, 'Well, it depends what the question is.' "

The ISTE-Microsoft venture comes at a time when digital responsibility is becoming a topic of national—and federal—discussion. The National Broadband Plan, released in March by the Federal Communications Commission, is calling for increased focus on digital literacy. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Education and Karen Cator, its director of education technology, want students to gain a grasp of digital citizenship, the concept of understanding and evaluating your actions as a member of a digital community. The ISTE-Microsoft curriculum scratches the surface of those issues in its civil discourse unit.

"When we posed these questions to a whole bunch of media specialists in the country, that's something that came back," O'Neal said. "Kids have a real hard time being in blogs and being civil. ... They're reading a statement someone says as truth, and getting really, really ticked off about it."

Other organizations are developing curricula that more thoroughly tackle the citizenship issue. Look for a blog post about one of them when the conference disperses and yours truly is back at EdWeek's Bethesda, Md., headquarters.

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