GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

The comments left on GothamSchools’ recent coverage of the Innovation Zone raised questions about the value of online learning similar to those we hear from our students and their families. As co-principals of the iSchool, a two-year-old school built around using online courses to individualize student learning, we thought it might be worthwhile to share the reasons we use online learning and how it works in our school.

Online learning means many different things at different schools. At the iSchool, we use the term to refer to courses where the content is delivered online only, and the teacher and student are not online at the same time. Each of our online courses is facilitated by an iSchool teacher, licensed in that content area, who designs the course, tracks student progress, and meets with students individually and in small groups when necessary. Our students spend about seven hours a week learning online at their own pace. Because of state regulations about awarding credit, these hours take place during the school day.

What does this look like inside our classrooms? Picture a traditional classroom with 34 students sitting in rows. Each student has a computer out on his/her desk and a notebook for taking notes. Each student is doing something different — some are watching a video of a teacher lecturing about the First Constitutional Convention (which students are pausing each time they take notes), some students are working on math problems, some are reading literature texts, and some are labeling the parts of a cell on a digital image.

We chose to incorporate online learning in our model for several important reasons:

1. Learning online is — and will continue to be — a reality for the world in which our students are growing up. Our students will be required to learn online during their college and graduate school experiences, as well as throughout their careers. If we are to prepare them to be successful in their future endeavors, we must prepare them to be successful online learners. (more…)
   

Former Gates Foundation education director Tom Vander Ark is behind one charter school’s application to open in New York City next year.

For years, Vander Ark shaped the educational giving for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, overseeing grants the organization gave to cities that agreed to build small high schools. Now a partner at an education public affairs firm in California, Vander Ark has supported such causes as lifting New York State’s charter cap and bringing more and better technology into classrooms.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Education confirmed that Vander Ark is behind the application for Bedford Preparatory Charter School, a small high school school that, if approved, would open in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn next school year. (more…)

Eight more schools will open this fall with the goal of using technology to change the way students and teachers work together, according to Schools Chancellor Joel Klein’s inaugural column on the Huffington Post’s new New York City site.

The schools will be in the model of the NYCiSchool, a small, selective high school that opened in Tribeca last fall as the first school in the city’s NYC21C initiative. (The name refers to the “21st-century skills” that technology-infused schools teach.) Klein touted the iSchool at the small schools panel discussion he introduced last week, saying that the school provides an example of how technology can be used to ”tailor the instructional journey of the child to the child’s needs.”

In his column today, Klein writes that the iSchool is pioneering a new “technology ‘culture,’” one that more schools should emulate:

In the past three years, the New York City Department of Education has created a number of technologies that allow teachers, principals, and parents to better understand students’ strengths and weaknesses and create academic programs that are tailored to the students’ needs. …

For New York City, the next big change is to change our technology “culture,” so we begin using modern tools to rethink the way our schools and classrooms are organized to most effectively engage students and bolster their achievement.

An iSchool student, Angelica Modabber, wrote about getting accustomed to using technology in her classes on this site in December. (more…)

On Tuesday morning, the 98 students at NYCiSchool gathered in their school’s common room to watch the inauguration of President Barack Obama. This is a report about that experience from Raquel and Angelica, two students who are writing occasional columns for GothamSchools on their experiences attending a New York City public school.

Raquel: Returning to school after a 3-day weekend to sit in front of two flatscreen televisions and watch Obama’s inauguration was nothing short of amazing, because we were glued to something more than a television screen. We were glued into history.

We also created historical artifacts of our own. A school-wide assignment required each student to write a list of the topics we wanted to hear Obama address in his speech. As the speech progressed, we recorded what topics he actually covered. This way, we were able to document not only what we heard, but what it meant to us.

I predict that unlike many school assignments, we’ll remember this one as not just one more piece of paper. Instead, we will be able to use this assignment as a tool to evaluate whether Obama has kept his word to America, and to us.

Angelica: We are teenagers, a rowdy group to tame, especially when concentrated all in one room — and yet the sound of Barack Obama’s even voice, fierce and calm, muted us. (more…)

Raquel Fitzgerald is one of two students from the NYCiSchool who will be writing occasional columns at GothamSchools on life as a New York City public school student.

Angelica, my classmate at the NYCiSchool, already explained how she adjusted to learning online, but you might still be wondering what it’s like to attend a school like ours on a day-to-day basis.

A day in the life of an online school involves more computer time and less teacher time.

The “commons” is the student lounge where we go to study, eat lunch or just relax. This room, filled with modern-style furniture and six plasma screen TVs, is where we first stop to catch our breath and exchange a few words with friends after traveling up five flights of stairs.

At 9:00 a.m. our principals come out of their cubicles to remind us that class is starting. (more…)

Angelica is one of two students who will be writing occasional columns for GothamSchools on their experiences attending a New York City public school.

I’m Angelica Modabber, a freshman at NYCiSchool. Unlike most schools, the iSchool is very technology-based, and students take many online courses.  Visitors to the iSchool often question this initiative, since at many other schools, lessons are still taught with a chalkboard and a teacher at the front of the room. Here’s how I came to embrace this style of learning.

When first presented with the “moodle,” (the website on which the courses are found) I was asked to sign in to my personal account and enroll myself in all the classes I would be taking that quarter. Once enrolled, I had access to all the exams, information, questionnaire sheets, and overall assignments.  I was bewildered by all the links, texts, and videos the site possessed.  I shrugged off the confusion; after all, how difficult could it be to sit in a classroom and simply read all the passages and paste them to memory?

In reality, though, like the other students, I was blown away by all the music playlists, YouTube videos, and infinite other distractions. The possibilities were endless. Although the school had done its best to block these diversions, there was always a distracting website left unguarded. (more…)

An article by Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn at Edutopia paints a picture of computers providing modified activities to fit students’ different learning styles — one student learns a sentence in Mandarin by playing a game, another through a memorization activity:

Both students are learning to put together sentences that they’ll use in a conversation together in front of the rest of the class — some of whom are using the same learning tools as these two, but many of whom are learning Mandarin in other ways tailored to the way they learn.

But decades of computers-in-schools efforts haven’t led to this kind of transformation of teaching and learning, the article points out. Right now, the courses offered by the Florida Virtual School, a leader in on-line learning, don’t seem all that different from traditional courses — while assignments offer some choice to students, and lessons link to websites with additional content, I saw no evidence of the kind of learning-style-oriented instruction described in the Edutopia article. Another purveyor of on-line courses, Apex Learning, claims to differentiate instruction through multimedia, but the site doesn’t provide demonstration or description of how this works.

The solution is to implement innovative technology models “where the alternative is no class at all,” let them improve over time, and slowly build more widespread demand, say Christensen and Horn.

Where do they envision on-line learning filling gaps in educational offerings? (more…)