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Cambridge Lakes rolling out new virtual school

July 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment

PINGREE GROVE – The Cambridge Academy is set to roll out its virtual learning curriculum this fall.

The Illinois Board of Education recently approved the Cambridge Lakes Charter School’s academic software for kindergarten through 12th-grade students.

The Cambridge Academy is designed to complement the teaching and learning of its existing charter students. School leaders plan to hold their first information session about the academy at noon July 30 at the school campus, 900 Wester Blvd. The second session is scheduled for noon Aug. 13.

Through the “blended-virtual” learning academy, the school will be able to provide a more individualized learning program for a student, especially if he or she either is excelling or falling behind in a particular subject, said Dawn Muhammad, director of the academy.

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UIS to help create online learning database

May 31, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The University of Illinois Springfield is one of six schools sharing a $1 million grant to develop a database to help predict online learning success and provide help to students who may need it.

UIS will participate in the Predictive Analytics Reporting Framework project directed by the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies.

Data to be collected include such things as a student’s age, academic record, gender, where he or she may have transferred from and other information, he said.

“In looking at the data, we should be able to identify patterns of success or trouble in the past,” said Ray Schroeder, director of the UIS Center for Online Learning, Research and Service. “Then we can assign tutors or otherwise make sure the students have help available to them.”

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Distance learning: Wave of the future?

May 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Kewanee, Ill. —

The Wethersfield School Board heard two words popping up more often these days in education — distance learning.
Junior/Senior High School Principal Jeremiah Johnston reported on a recent trip to Avon where a small school in a rural area is utilizing distance learning to an extensive degree.
As the words imply, distance learning involves students in one or more locations being taught by a teacher elsewhere via video and audio links. Off-site learning has been around for 20 years, first utilizing satellite and dish technology to make courses available to schools that couldn’t afford teachers and textbooks for higher-level courses such as psychology, marine biology and Japanese.
In the 21st Century, distance learning is done over the Internet. It doesn’t matter whether the teacher is in a classroom thousands of miles away — or just across town.
Johnston said he sat in on a class taught by a professor from Carl Sandburg College in Galesburg to students at Avon and Williamsfield high schools in a virtual setting where students at both schools and the teacher could see and communicate with each other in real time.

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K12 Inc. Announces Upcoming Investor Conferences

May 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment

HERNDON, Va

K12 Inc. (NYSE: LRN), the nation’s largest provider of proprietary curriculum and online school programs for students in kindergarten through high school, announced today it will present at the following investor conferences:

RW Baird 2011 Growth Stock Conference, Chicago, IL

Wednesday, May 11, 2011, 12:30 PM (CT)

Barclays Capital 2011 Global Services Conference, Boston, MA

Thursday, May 12, 2011, 2:40 PM (ET)

The presentation will be webcast live and can be accessed from the Investor Relations section of the Company’s website at www.k12.com. The audio will also be archived and available for replay there for 30 days.

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Help for charter schools

May 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Board members also renewed the charter of Chicago Virtual Charter School, which flunked its accountability plan. It won low marks on 57 of 74 indicators, failing particularly in areas involving attendance, transfers-out and dropouts.

Chicago Virtual students attend lab classes twice a week at 38 S. Peoria and work online at home, overseen by adults who agrees to act as “learning coaches.”

The school’s transfer-out rate has been improving, CPS officials said, and its test scores beat citywide averages.

Board members approved the consolidation of Carpenter into Talcott; Andersen into LaSalle II; Schneider into Jahn; Avondale Elementary into Logandale Middle and three small high schools in the old Bowen High building into a fourth small school there — New Millennium.

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Online learning for Illinois high schoolers inspires praise, suspicion

April 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

“There is no real, robust, state-led effort in online learning yet in Illinois … (but) I can say with confidence that at this time next year, legislators in Springfield will be talking about online learning as a policy priority,” said Collin Hitt of the Illinois Policy Institute.

Internet-based education has grown slowly in Illinois. The state introduced a virtual high school in 2001, intended mainly for students who wanted to take advanced classes their own schools didn’t offer.

Today, its online program offers 120 courses to grades 5 through 12, but only about 1,000 of the state’s 1.2 million public school students in that age range sign up each semester. Cindy Hamblin, director of the Illinois Virtual School, said its enrollments could be relatively small because some districts contract with private companies to provide online courses.

That’s what happened in District U-46, which this year bought “credit recovery” classes from Apex, a Seattle-based company. The courses are meant for those who have failed in a regular classroom, and Assistant Superintendent Greg Walker said the students often find the computer to be liberating.

“They’re moving at their own pace,” he said. “They’re able to go back and look at things, where in a traditional classroom it might be moving too fast for them.”

Few school systems, though, have done as much as Indian Prairie District 204, which started an in-house program nine years ago.

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More Pupils Are Learning Online, Fueling Debate on Quality

April 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Chicago and New York City have introduced pilot online learning programs. In New York, Innovation Zone, or iZone, includes online makeup and Advanced Placement courses at 30 high schools, as well as personalized after-school computer drills in math and English for elementary students.

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Reorganization plan advances

March 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment

One guest in attendance, John Slater, of Bushnell, voiced his concerns with a number of the subcommittees’ recommendations, including those pertaining to curriculum and transportation.

Slater told transportation Vice Chairman Dan Mahr that he was concerned about the length of bus rides some students might face in a consolidated district, as well as the overall safety of students.

“You’re going to have a lot of students who ride the bus for a shorter time than they do currently,” Mahr countered to Slater.

Slater also pressed the Committee of 10 to consider using Illinois Virtual School, which provides online courses to high school students and distance learning courses from local community colleges. Those additions, Slater said, can provide high-level courses to students without adding cost to the school district.

“You’re pushing for this Virtual School because you don’t want to consolidate,” Sharon Lomax, a member of the curriculum subcommittee and a math instructor at Carl Sandburg College, responded to Slater. “Wouldn’t it be better to have a curriculum with a teacher in the classroom?”

Jerry Arthur, Committee of 10 chair, said once the committee has a chance to discuss the recommendations they will be placed on file in each school district’s administrative office.

Arthur was unsure when that might be and stated he didn’t want the Committee of 10 to put something on public display that might later be thrown out by the committee. The subcommittees’ information was accurate, Arthur said, “but it’s very difficult to say if this will be exact.”

The next Committee of 10 meeting is scheduled for 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 28, at the Bushnell-Prairie City High School.

The B-PC, Avon and Abingdon school districts agreed to form the Committee of 10 after the results of a feasibility study released in January 2010 concluded that a three-way consolidation was the best reorganization option for the districts.

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Mann Students are Lacing up the Digital Divide

March 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Cristen Vincent, the enrichment instructor at Mann School, is leading this group of adolescent activists on a service learning project designed to grow the students in far-reaching ways – beyond the curriculum’s set standards for traditional classroom learning. And the students have flourished indeed.

As I sit down to chat with these verdant industrialists, I am struck again and again by their keen observations, their highly developed problem-solving skills, and their benevolence.

Global Virtual Classroom is an educational program uniting children from different schools in the United States and abroad in an effort to nurture an interest in international affairs. GVC’s vision is to empower, enable and connect students around the world using Internet technology while developing essential skills like cross-cultural communication, collaboration through teamwork, information technology and website design.

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Cambridge Lakes charter school starts open enrollment

March 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

In December, the District 300 school board approved extending the charter through 2014.

The renewal includes implementation of a virtual learning program serving kindergarten through 12th-grade students. The program is expected to expand this summer.

Aside from the district’s charter approval, the school operates independently under the management of the Northern Kane Educational Corp.

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