Online practice improves teaching

ABCTE is finding that in order to improve their program they should have all of potential teachers teach an online lesson in their subject area. This would help reinforce the subject matter, help others that might be struggling with that subject matter and give teachers some experience with online teaching. Just as all teachers now have some experience with ELL, special needs and gifted students, they will all soon have to teach a virtual class.

Now it turns out there is some research that says this is the right path according to the Chronicle of Higher Ed story: Learning from Online. Researchers at Purdue University at Calumet believe that learning how to do distance education properly can make professors better at designing and administering their classroom-based courses. It really reinforces what they are working towards.

From the article:
“Since most professors have spent their lives holding forth from the front of a lecture hall, many have not had to engineer their lesson plans with the sort of rigor required of a well-designed online course, Buckenmeyer says.When teaching online, she says, “You have to pay more attention to the navigation of the course, the clarity of the course, the objectives of the course, the reason why you’re assigning activities and assessments, [and make] certain everything is perfectly clear to the students. In a face-to-face situation, you can get by with just coming in and not having prepared and winging a class session. You can’t do that online.”

Teaching in the virtual world not only does prepares teachers for hybrid schools of the future, but will make them better teachers in a brick and mortar classroom as well.

Cyber Monday!

ABCTE is running a Cyber Monday promotion. Always great to see online programs fully leveraging the web to build their business.

Cyber Monday for Teachers

The great team we have at ABCTE continues to push the digital envelope when it comes to marketing. Since they are an online teacher training program, they are launching a Cyber Monday deal to provide a $150 discount on the full program price. Since this is a widely searched term, it once again increases traffic and sales at a time when sales are normally slow.

ABCTE Cyber Monday for teachers - just another great way to get the word out about a great program

The future of online learning

Great panel discussion on the Keeping Pace with K-12 Online Learning report.

I kept up with the discussion on the wikispace dedicated to the event which was a good discussion. A lot of information on virtual schools.

Drupal vs Joomla a cage match

One of the toughest things to stay on top of right now is our web strategy because everything changes so fast. What worked a year ago no longer works now. Creating websites in-house made sense but now it is so cheap that doing it with contractors seems to make more sense. Right now you can have a group design and launch a new website cheaper and faster than you coudl do it on your own and you can then maintain it in-house with the great tools that exist today.

Right now we have a mini-test going on to see two things;

• Is Joomla or Drupal better for us as an organization
• Does having a micro-site with a real purpose help traffic to our original site

So abcte.org is our core site for teacher certification and we just launched charterteacher.com to help charter school teachers and charter school leaders with professional development, teaching job searches and job postings as well as a forum for charter teachers.

We are deploying the full social media push as well as everything we have learned on SEO on this site as well as revamping our core site. Very excited to track the data to see how this will impact our future online strategy.

$40M Reasons to Digitize Texts

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt just signed a $40 million multi year deal to sell a computer based teaching system it developed with Microsoft to connect teachers, students and administrators. It is a shift away from textbooks!

There are some texts but it mostly involves a customized interactive classroom. So in order to survive in the new world of textbook publishing, they are bringing together the best of learning management systems and content to schools.

Over at ABCTE we have an RFP for LMS and are fascinated with how many systems are out there. The group that really puts together a "best of" content, content delivery, and management will be the new leader in the business formerly called textbook publishing.

Now we just need to get them some Scholarity to create a tutor-like experience for students through software and we can really watch this take off!

Blog Carnival of Education innovation!!

The new Blog Carnival of Education Innovation is up at ABCTE - - give it a read and find out what is going on in the blogosphere. With a Scholarity posting!