Connexions

I regularly have several projects going on at the same time. One very cool and very secret project came to initial fruition today. My district, Fresno Unified School District, was selected to be one of four districts within California to be part of a pilot of iPads. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) and Apple are providing support for the pilot and converted an Algebra 1 textbook into a digital version.

This is a year-long pilot and in our district it includes four schools on two campuses. The pilot includes a research study paid for by HMH. It seems to present a unique opportunity to compare like with like.

You can read about it in the Fresno Bee here.

I am giving a presentation virtually tomorrow for the eLearning Special Interest Group of CUE, Computer Users in Education. It’s been a while since I have presented in Elluminate, so it should be interesting. I am going to talk about the current state of online high schools both in California and nationally. Still pulling together some of the pieces. I will try to come back in the next day or two and post about the experience, but also share some of it here.

Yes, I’ll take a thousand of these, please!

I just now reserved my room for iNACOL‘s Virtual School Symposium in November. This year it will be in Glendale, Arizona.

If you work in online learning, if your school district is considering online learning, if there is the remotest possibility that you need to learn more about online learning, this is the one conference that you should attend. No others even come close.

Have you reserved your room?

Have you registered for the conference?

Two questions:

1. How do I know that this is a school with quality instruction and quality administration?
2. How do we replicate this for our online students?

I had an interesting exchange with an online high school teacher who shall remain nameless. He works full-time in a school district that has a policy against “friending” current students on social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, etc.), but also works part-time for an online high school that has no such policy. He asked my opinion as to whether it was fair for him to friend one group of students, but not another group.

I chose to re-frame the question: Should you be friending current students at all?

My answer with most such questions is that it depends. I have a couple of hundred friends on Facebook. Some are really friends, some are long-lost high school friends, some are online school folks, a few are former students. At this point in time, I don’t have what you could call current students (beyond the graduate students I teach).

I have some friends who put it all out there on their Facebook page (pictures of them with alcohol, in semi-compromising poses, etc.). If you are in this group, my take is that you do not want to be friending students whether there is an official policy or not.

I don’t have those pictures of myself doing such things on any social networking sites. I feel reasonably comfortable having former students of mine (but still current students in my district) friending me on a case by case basis. Were I a different person, I would likely treat this differently.

And here’s the key: I am not saying that you should or should not post anything on these sites. What I am saying is that your privacy settings and your contact list should reflect whom you have selected for your audience.

Back to the online high school teacher. His thought was because he had a different relationship with the online students – he did not see them everyday – that it was reasonable. I always have problems with that word reasonable, but I can tell you that the parents of those online high school students probably do not see it any differently.

Right, wrong, whatever, teachers are held to a different standard. The Internet is full of examples of teachers who chose to push back on that different standard.

As some of you know, I teach graduate courses in the School of Education at Fresno Pacific University. Specifically, I teach in the online Library Media program (and soon in the online Educational Technology program; more on that later). Of all the things that I do, I really enjoy working with these students. It makes me better at so many things.

The course I teach is called LIB 705: Digital-Age School Library Technology and it’s a lot of fun. We learn about blogs, wikis, podcasts, making movies, YouTube, technology standards, and much more. This course is part of the Teacher Librarian Services Credential. Most of the students are working toward becoming school librarians (as I was at one point not that long ago), but there are often one or two students from other programs who need a technology course. This is the first course in the program, so it is part technology and part orientation to the rest of the program.

I have also been working on taking this same course and developing it into the first course in a new Educational Technology program. Similar topics (if you know anything about modern school libraries), so just some modifications.