Director's Blog for Dec. 1, 2009

21st Century Leaders and Learners:

Check out our guest blog from Chief Technology Officer, Ken Buck, of Columbus County Schools this week here @ www.thevlc.org and/or our videocast from Chief Professional Learning and Communications Officer, Dave Edwards of the North Carolina Virtual Public School here at www.ncvps.org. Both of these pieces address the kinds of critical conversations educational leaders are having around blended learning in North Carolina school districts as we all head into the holiday season and towards serving North Carolina students this spring.

And now for more news and notes:

1.) Dr. Setser to serve on National Race to the Top panel Wednesday @ 4:00p.m. http://www.iitsec.org/

Feel free to tweet into the conversation at #ncrttt.

2.) NCVPS travels to the Halifax County School District this week in preparation for our January 2010 GO LIVE series. For more on GO LIVE - click here: http://www.ncvps.org/golive/index.htm

3.) Where does NCVPS stand nationally? 1.) Key roles in the State Virtual Leaders Alliance; 2.) NCVPS - 5th Largest Virtual School in Nation; 3.) Credit Recovery/Modular/ Blended Learning processes are recognized regionally and nationally.

4.) Want more evidence that virtual and blended learning are taking hold?

-Texas Virtual School Network provides a clearinghouse for districts to review and access available online content

-Washington created the Digital Learning Department within the Office of the Superintendent

-Missouri passed a law that allows 94% of average daily membership (per-pupil FTE funding) to be spent on virtual education, allowing districts to develop and offer their own online courses in conjunction with MVLA

-Michigan’s Superintendent of Public Instruction expanded a process that allows school districts to seek a waiver of the state’s pupil accounting rules to allow eligible full-time students to take all of their coursework online

-Montana created a new state virtual school, the Montana Virtual Academy which will be operated out of the University of Montana’s College of Education in Fall 2010

-Maine created the Maine Online Learning Program, which is intended to offer both full-time and supplemental options for grades K through 12 throughout the state by aggregating online providers for districts across the state

-Arizona removed the pilot status and cap from its online learning program, which had been limited to 14 schools across the state. The new program, Arizona Online Instruction, funds online students at 80% to 95% of the state’s base funding level

-Minnesota became one of the first states to recognize in state-level policy that there are national standards for quality in online learning by requiring at the time of certification that programs “meet nationally recognized standards”

-The Colorado Department of Educations Unit of Online Learning published its first report on activity and results of single-district, multidistrict, and other online programs

5.) Where are we headed with blended instruction and how does it relate to Bloom's taxonomy and what we are learning about best in class blended instruction? How about you tube for remembering, Twitter for understanding, Google Docs for analyzing, Wikipedia for evaluation, and gaming for creating. These are just some examples of how we are blending the learning horizons of tomorrow at NCVPS with our course design processes. The bottom line is we are well positioned nationally and in this state to be a leader in blended learning. We encourage you to read the Keeping Pace report for more information on e-learning across the nation: http://www.kpk12.com/.

Do not hesitate to contact us if we can be of service with the virtual advantage of www.ncvps.org and www.nclearnandearn.gov for your school district!

Have a great week!

Bryan