Are Online Courses Are Effective?

Who’s to determine if online schooling is working? Or perhaps the question should be rephrased: Are all students involved in online learning keeping up with what they are supposed to be learning? The problem is accountability. Because of recent criticism of student progress in online courses, some virtual schools are bringing students into schools for testing; providing assessments and intervention throughout courses; determining if online students make adequate yearly progress compared to students in traditional courses; and keeping track of the length of time it takes students to complete assignments, how many times students and teachers interact, and how often students participate in courses. Because online courses are populated mostly by bright students who want to move ahead in learning and at-risk students who need additional help with learning, it is difficult to compare student achievement in E-courses to student achievement in traditional settings.  According to Michelle R. Davis’ Education Week piece, E-Schools Put Specific Measures for Success in Place,  much of the criticism was focused upon private, for-profit online courses, but public schools have taken these criticisms to heart to make sure their online learning opportunities for students are successful and accountable.

Think Locally About Ed Tech Needs

Maybe you are thinking about purchasing some of the latest technologies for your school or classroom and decide to look for research on the product or methodology.  Chances are, you won’t find it. With the speed of changes in technology, research can’t possibly keep up. Good research takes time (usually years), and if you wait for it, the ed tech world will move on to new products and ideas before you are able to make a decision about what to purchase.

In order to help school leaders with decisions about educational innovation, Laura Devaney, Managing Editor of eSchool News, in her article How Can Research Inform Ed-Tech Decisions?, offers ideas from Stanford’s Larry Cuban, North Carolina State’s Glenn Kleiman, and Harvard’s Chris Dede. Kleiman suggests that schools follow their own research to find what needs improving and what “approach is the best fit for [their] context.”  According to Dede, if school leaders decide to give all students digital devices, they need to remember, whether there is research or not, that good results probably won’t happen without staff support, staff development, and curricular changes. Cuban suggests that the first question school leaders should ask is: “What is the problem to which an iPad or a laptop is the solution?”

The bottom line seems to be that educators can’t expect to find research to justify purchases of technologies, and that even if they did, they may discover that their local needs don’t fit the research. It’s time to ask the right questions locally before seeking answers and spending money.

Haven’t we been saying that one-size-doesn’t-fit-all in education? That’s what Kleiman says as well.

New York State Approves i-Ready Diagnostic

Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready Diagnostic Reading and Math Assessment K-8 is on the List of Approved Student Assessments for Use by School Districts and BOCES in Teacher and Principal Evaluations. A portion of what local districts in New York pay for the product is eligible for state aid reimbursement. On the Curriculum Associates site, you can look up information about i-Ready in your state.

i-Ready is an online platform for learning math and reading for Grades K-6 and an individualized diagnostic program for Grades K-8. There are 600+ lessons in the i-Ready product family, which are used after following individual learning plans generated by i-Ready diagnostics. Results of assessments are immediately available to teachers and administrators through reports by grade level and domain. A yearly subscription to all of i-Ready’s instructional and diagnostics programs is $27 per student; schools can purchase the diagnostic part separately for $6 per student per year.

Teacher Morale at 20-Year Low

The MetLife Survey of THE AMERICAN TEACHER, completed between October and August of 2011, talked to 1000+ teachers K-12 by telephone, to 100+ parents and guardians of students in Grades 3-12 online, and almost 1000 students in Grades 3-12. According to the Executive Summary of the report, only 44% of teachers are satisfied with their job and many feel that their job is not secure. Twenty-nine percent of the teachers interviewed said, “They are very or fairly likely to leave the profession.” Why? Answers given by those in the survey included problems of school budgets; layoffs; larger classes; lack of salary increases along with higher insurance costs; reductions in programs in art, music, foreign language, and physical education; reductions in health services; lack of up-to-date technology; and pessimism about student achievement. In 2008, the MetLife Survey showed that 62% of teachers were satisfied with their jobs. 

Teacher’s Assistant; Student Tutor—Writing

English teachers know that it’s not easy to include writing in their courses especially considering the many other facets of language arts they need to cover. Writing takes time to teach, time for edits, and time for rewrites—plus evaluation. Although students need practice in writing skills, many don’t get the guidance they need to become better writers. Prentice-Hall offers an online Writing Coach (Grades 6-12), which has the ability to help students with writing and teachers with the grading of student writing. Through practice in writing, students learn such skills as varying sentence patterns and length and putting correct grammar to use. I had a good time trying out my writing in the program because it was fun for me to see what this digital coach thought of my work. Of course, Prentice-Hall Writing Coach can’t replace teachers, but it could be a big help to teachers and give a writing boost to students.

Digital Tools Support Writing

Julie D. Ramsay’s Can We Skip Lunch and Keep Writing? (Stenhouse Publishers) offers ideas for collaborating in class and online for Grades 3-8. It’s available as an ebook for $18 and paperback for $20 plus $5 shipping. The activities in the book, including publishing podcasts and writing digital stories, target getting students “fired up for writing” through the use of communication and digital tools. Ramsey suggests picking the tool or tools that work best for you and your students and then putting your students to work collaborating with others around the world and publishing their own work.  Why not check out an online preview of the book?

Being a Principal Is Not an Easy Job

If you look at school from a principal’s viewpoint, especially those who are relatively new to the job, you might find that putting out “small fires” and sometimes “big fires” take a great deal of their time. Even if principals come to the job with special administrative training, it’s difficult for them to think ahead about curriculum, teaching, and moving forward with technologies when their days are filled up with administrative tasks and problems that cannot be handled by another on the staff. Education Week reports (in Samuel’s Principal Turnover Bodes Poorly for Schools) that many principals (about 20%) leave their job within one to two years and only about 50% are still at their schools after five years even though it takes about three years for principals to “get the lay of the land” at a school in order to make a difference. They leave for a variety of reasons, including the inability to raise test scores quickly.  So what do we need to provide schools with the best principals?  We need to engage educators who will be effective leaders in specialized training for their jobs, we need to encourage principals to continue on at their schools even though the first few years may be difficult, and we need to encourage principals to learn to appreciate the culture within a school and use this knowledge plus collaboration with staff to bring about change.

Education Week also provides a PDF download ($4.95) called Spotlight on Principals, which features nine articles on topics such as training and evaluation, recruiting effective school leaders, secrets of success, and principal turnover.

21st Century Teaching & Learning Plan

Attention School Leaders: ASCD (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development and CoSN (Consortium for School Networking) have announced that they will work together to provide the online course: From Vision to Action: The 21^st Century Teaching and Learning Plan.  This will be a collaborative and interactive program in which school leaders will work together using tools such as readings, videos, presentations and application exercises to develop and implement a plan, which will reflect 21^st century teaching and learning. The price for the course is $99.

What Makes Finland’s Students Excel?

Finnish students score tops in the world in reading, mathematics, and science even though the schools include many immigrant children who come to Finland not knowing the language. Why are the students doing so well when we in the U.S. don’t seem to be making progress? According to Finnish teachers, they do whatever it takes to make their students successful. This might mean having boys read Captain Underpants to encourage them to get going with reading or “park” a student who needs private instruction next to the teacher’s desk. LynNell Hancock’s “Why Are Finland’s School’s Successful” (Smithsonian Magazine, September 2011) explains that: Finnish teachers are “selected from the top 10 percent of the nation’s graduates to earn a required master’s degree in education”; about 30 percent of students are given additional help; each school has the same broad national goals; students learn how to learn instead of how to take a test (only one test is required and that is in the senior year); students begin school at age 7, but most children attend a public preschool at 5 or 6; there is an emphasis upon physical activity between studies; students do not have much homework; there are no Internet filters, and very few students are pulled out for special classes (mostly for Finnish language instruction). Teachers have the same status in the country as doctors and lawyers, usually have aides or learning specialists to help them, and the student to teacher ratio is low—about 7-1 in one school. Towns guide school policies and accountability is determined by the teachers and principals in the schools. Medical care, food, and other forms of help are provided in the schools for students who need it.  Whatever the ingredients that go into Finland’s success with its students, “teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around.”

When Traditional Testing Will Have to Change?

Not too long from now, we will be able to access the Internet from our contact lenses and glasses. This development will definitely change the way we test our students, for they’ll be able to look up whatever they want and won’t need to memorize facts.  Having them remove their glasses or lenses doesn’t seem to be a viable solution, but revamping our testing systems does.