No More Excuse For NOT Learning,

BECAUSE practically E V E R Y T H I N G is available via ONLINE Learning. And since you can connect to it from your iPhone or Android from anywhere any time, learning can be easy and fun. You’ll be able to have live connections to almost any kind of teacher, attend video lectures, take part in science experiments, learn history, languages, how to cook, whatever subject of your choice. One such platform is “Google Classroom” https://classroom.google.com which gives teachers the tools to teach, and for learners to go to and learn. According to Wikipedia, “Google Scholar” is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and much more: https://scholar.google.com Apart from the Google connections, the classroom can come to anybody at any place where they can be in front of a computer or TV screen. Likewise, anybody being exposed to such educational presentations will be able to interact with them, asking questions, receiving additional and deeper background information, taking tests, and communicating with a teacher, regardless whether that teacher is physically nearby or continents away. Here is a list of educational websites, Online Learning Institutions & Portals one of which may be your perfect fit. https://straube.org/online-learning/ Why not try them out? Have fun!

Online Pre-K Literacy Program UPSTART Powers Educational Success for At-Risk Children

The online pre-kindergarten (pre-K) literacy program called UPSTART created by Waterford.org seeks to blend the best aspects of learning science, mentoring relationships, and innovative technologies to form community, school, and in-home programs that deliver literacy excellence and equity for unserved and under-served four-year-old learners.

About half of America’s four-year-old children are not prepared to begin kindergarten when they turn five. In Philadelphia, for example, nearly two-thirds of children cannot read at grade level by the fourth grade, which is a challenge made worse by a shortage of affordable pre-K literacy programs. Children without access to pre-K education may enter school as many as two years behind and may never catch up with their classmates. Their parents have little or no affordable access to early education solutions to prepare their children for school. And their children therefore are at the greatest risk of multi-generational functional illiteracy that can adversely affect them for the rest of their lives.

The nonprofit Waterford.org in Salt Lake City, Utah, has created an evidence-tested, home-based, successful, online pre-K literacy program called UPSTART. UPSTART enables early education access to unserved and under-served families in their homes by providing parental support, technology, and internet connectivity, thereby ensuring equity and fairness for all four-year-olds, regardless of their socio-economic status. In Utah’s Washington County School District, for example, about half of its schools are Title I schools with students who faced significant achievement gaps and were unable to catch up with their peers. The district ran two early learning programs simultaneously to prepare their children for kindergarten. After a head-to-head comparison, the children who used Waterford.org software displayed greater gains in early literacy and were better prepared to enter kindergarten than students who did not use Waterford UPSTART.

Waterford UPSTART empowers parents because the program is voluntary and it increases parental choice, parental involvement, and parental control of their children’s learning. UPSTART supports families through personalized parental coaching, empowering parents as their children’s first educator in the home to prepare their children to arrive at school ready to learn. Parents help their children invest 15 minutes online for five days per week for nine months using exciting literacy programming. Waterford UPSTART children thereby enter kindergarten reading at nearly a first-grade level and outperform their peers on standardized tests at least through the fourth grade.

According to a New York Times story, most states have preschool choices — some public, some private, half day, full day, local and state run. But many families fall in between, earning too much to qualify for public programs while not being able to afford private ones, or living too far from the nearest site-based pre-K school, or living in states which do not yet provide publicly-financed pre-K education.

UPSTART has been pilot-tested in urban working-class families, low-income rural families, and non-English-speaking refugee families. The online UPSTART lessons are animated, funny, and interesting to children; they keep children’s attention as they learn. In one lesson, for example, children listen to a song and watch a video about how “gh” is silent in many English words. 

UPSTART is funded by state legislatures, private donations from programs like TED’s philanthropic arm called the Audacious Project, and grants from the federal Department of Education.

Waterford.org was founded by Dr. Dustin Heuston, a pioneering educator who believed every child is entitled to lifelong learning success. Over the years, Dr. Heuston built a technology-based collaborative model of child, family, and educator engagement that delivers significant and lasting academic achievement gains. 

Blog Author James R. Holbrook is a retired clinical legal professor who is a board member of Waterford.org.

Happy New Year 2020!

In this first blog post of 2020, I’ll introduce myself and some changes coming to the Straube Foundation Education blog. 

I am Michele Straube.  I am recently retired as an environmental mediator and law school professor.  Meaning I have a background in teaching, albeit not online teaching.  I am currently a student working toward a certificate in teaching English as a second language.  The certificate program is virtually all online (even though the program is based at my local university), so I have personal experience as a student of online education.  I have great curiosity about the pedagogy of online education, especially how the benefits of in-class interactions can be replicated online. 

I am looking forward to taking over blog management.  I hope to share with you what I learn about my many open questions.  There will also be guest blog authors and re-posts from their blogs, focusing especially on the great variety of online education programs, their successes and challenges.

I’d love to hear what online education topics you, our readers, are interested in learning more about.  Email me your suggestions here, and we’ll see what we can do.

Until the next post, here are some online education resources to keep you learning:

·      Top 100 E-Learning Blogs, Websites & Influencers in 2020

·      21 Astonishing E-learning Statistics for 2019