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.

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.

iNACOL VSS

Always love the acronyms in education. But we are pretty excited to be heading down to San Antonio for the International Association for K12 Online Learning's Virtual School Symposium. Since Scholarity has developed state of the art education software to deliver a tutor like experience for students, we will be working to demonstrate this product to some of the great content providers at the conference. If you are interested, please let us know by going through the Scholarity site.

There is some great content and some great content management and even some great delivery. Combine those with dynamic insight technology and you could rule the web.

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!