Your Kids Will Beg to Play BrainPop!

By Jenny Williams

To me, learning is almost always fun. I never want to stop learning, and am always seeking out new things to try and new bits of information to know. I remember this not quite being the case when I was a child, however, and the same is true for most kids. School wasn’t always fun, even when the teacher tried to make it so. Some subjects can be dry, but a fun experience with a dry subject can keep you motivated to learn.

Regardless of whether you homeschool, like we do, or send your child to a public, private or charter school, there is always room for additional fun learning opportunities. Nature walks, museum trips, hands-on activities and countless other options are available to you. There are also many sites on the internet you can use in your child’s education, or they can supplement what the kids get at school. Some of these sites are excellent, but some are not so excellent. It’s often hard to tell the difference.

One site that I discovered many months ago is BrainPop. The main site is geared toward grades 3 and up, but it is part of a family of sites which also includes BrainPop Jr, for grades K-3, and BrainPop Español, seemingly for all ages. Separately, there is also BrainPop UK for grades 3-9, for those across the pond. While all these are pay sites, they all have some videos you can watch for free, and there are different levels of subscriptions. I’ve discovered that they are well worth the subscription price, however. They are full of information and my kids have really enjoyed them. While none of these sites is a comprehensive curriculum for school, they supplement and add on to schooling very well. Subjects range from reading and math to holidays and civic responsibility. The folks at BrainPop are always putting up new videos, sometimes at the same time as national holidays or special months, so even if you’ve subscribed in the past, there will always be something new.

BrainPop Jr

Since my kids are included in the BrainPop Jr age group, we have spent most of our time there. They currently have about 120 videos which are divided up into six categories: science, writing, social studies, health, reading and math. Each video page consists of a video with Moby, a beeping robot, and Annie, a very sweet girl. Annie’s voice is very gentle, and she comes off as both knowledgeable and friendly. After you’ve watched the video on either regular mode or full-screen, there is a huge number of other things to do.

Read More http://www.wired.com/geekdad/tag/online-game/#ixzz0pVhbRPJc

Online schooling pays off in grades, college scholarship

By Kenya Woodard

PALM COAST -- Stephanie Bettis, 18, has never passed a note in class, eaten lunch with friends in the cafeteria or listened to a teacher lecture.

For Bettis, the classroom is wherever her laptop is located.

Bettis, a senior, has been home-schooled for much of her education. Her father's job as a business consultant kept the family on the move. The Bettises permanently settled in Bunnell in 1997.

As Bettis' freshman year approached, however, her parents gave her the option to attend Flagler Palm Coast High School. By now, Bettis was comfortable learning at home and she turned down the offer in favor of continuing her education via the Internet.

And so, for the last four years, Bettis' classroom has been wherever her laptop is located.

Before the start of each school year, Bettis said she considered enrolling at Flagler Palm Coast because she craved more socialization with her peers.

But a fear that the traditional school setting would distract her from her studies kept her at home, she said.

Bettis said she believes the decision to study on her own and miss out on attending prom and cheering on the team at homecoming games paid off.

On Friday, she will "graduate" with a 4.0 GPA from Florida Virtual School.

The future marine biologist scored an 1800 on her SATs (out of a perfect 2400) and is headed to Stetson University, which gave her a full-tuition scholarship, she said. Bettis said she has no regrets about missing out on the highs and lows of a traditional high school experience.

"It's been really cool," she said.

Bettis isn't alone in her decision to pursue her education online. A 2006 report by the North American Council for Online Learning found that virtual education enrollment in grades K-12 is expected to increase an estimated 30 percent annually.

Read More: http://www.news-journalonline.com/news/local/flagler/2010/05/20/online-schooling-pays-off-in-grades-college-scholarship.html

Distance Learning or Bricks & Mortar?

Distance learning philanthropist Gerhard Andlinger donated $100 million for the Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University. Princeton just announced that construction will begin in 2012. A quick look at his bio reveals that the Austrian-born teenager first came to this country as the winner of an essay contest, studied economics and (prophetically) Arabic at Princeton, earned a Harvard MBA, and had an obviously profitable career that included stints with ITT plus his own leveraged buyout firm.

Andlinger must believe in distance learning because he endowed a professorship in distance learning at Cornell's medical school, officially known as the Joan and Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University.

Yet at Princeton he donated for bricks and mortar. When you think about it, that's no conflict. Medicine lends itself to distance learning. Energy research does not. One of the buildings designed by Tod Williams for the Andlinger Center will be built on bedrock three stories below ground to reduce vibrations.

My house is just blocks away from the proposed construction site, where the vibrations from the excavations will rival those from the rock bands at the dining clubs, just yards away on Prospect Street. Their thump thump thump echoes in my house behind closed doors. But though I'm not looking forward to the excavation, I have to admit the Andlinger complex will be beautiful.

Three Game Changing Tools That Will Transform Education

By James Andrews

I'm blessed with the opportunity to send my children to a private school that uses both the community and many of the creative and technological tools possible to educate. There is no resource they are not afraid to use and I love them for it. I've seen them ask a parent with DJ skills to teach music curation or deploy an Iranian Grandparent to further explore the conflict in that region. The school my children attend has everything they need to be successful through leadership that thinks beyond limits or boundaries. This spirit transfers to our own home where my wife and I utilize a "surround sound" digital approach to compliment what my kids receive during the school day..

With this as a backdrop I am constantly thinking about non-traditional tools that I believe will have a significant impact on the future of education. Much like my own kids' school, I think about how to educate my children outside of the four traditional walls of a classroom. What's cool is that there's some great technology out there that allows for an expansion of the four walls of a traditional classroom. Here are three tools to consider:

Read More: http://www.fastcompany.com/1622924/three-game-changing-tools-that-will-transform-education

The CAT Viewpoint

By Carol A. Twigg

Changing the Equation: Scaling a Proven Innovation

With support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) recently announced a major program, Changing the Equation. The program will engage the nation’s community colleges in a successful redesign of their remedial/developmental math sequences (i.e., all mathematics courses offered at the institution prior to the first college-level math course.) The goal of this new redesign program is to improve student learning outcomes in remedial/developmental math while reducing costs for both students and institutions using NCAT’s proven redesign methodology. Institutions will be selected to participate in the program through a competitive application process described in the program’s Application Guidelines and will receive a $40,000 grant to support the implementation of their redesigns. Those institutions will be expected to pilot their redesign plans in spring 2011 and fully implement their plans in fall 2011.

Background

A major obstacle for students who are pursuing degrees or credentials in community colleges is successfully completing the college mathematics requirement. Unfortunately, that frequently means completing both remedial and/or developmental math courses as well as college-level math courses. A 2004 study by the U.S. Department of Education found that over 60% of community-college students needed remediation. Students lacking in the competencies and skills required to enroll in college-level courses face significant challenges persisting to a degree.

Unfortunately, there has been very little change in how institutions design their academic programs and create support systems to meet the needs of their students who enter college without the necessary skills to perform college-level work. Successful completion rates in community colleges for remedial and developmental math courses rarely move beyond 50% and are often less than that. Completing a series of non-credit courses to overcome deficiencies involves significant time and money for students, slowing academic progress and sometimes derailing the momentum that comes with initial enrollment in postsecondary education....

Read More: http://www.thencat.org/Newsletters/Jan10.htm#1

Florida Tax Credit Scholarships Program
Good news for choice!
To encourage private,
voluntary contributions,
to expand educational opportunities for children of families that have limited financial resources and to enable children in this state to achieve a greater level of excellence in their education,
the 2001 Florida Legislature created Section 220.187, Florida Statutes, establishing the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program.

Scholarship Funding Organization (SFO) Information

The law provides for
state tax credits for contributions
to nonprofit scholarship funding organizations, called SFOs.

The SFO's then award scholarships to eligible children of families that have limited financial resources. 

LVKen7@Gmail.com 

Computer Generated Education: The Technology Revolution in America's Classrooms

Melanie Smollin

The students in Kelly Flowers’ first-grade classroom at Henry Clay Elementary School in Chicago happily spend part of each day in complete silence. They turn off the lights, put on their headphones, and become absorbed by the small blue machines they hold in their hands, pressing buttons in response to the interactive games and activities they see on screen.

Simple to use, durable, and relatively inexpensive at $100 each, a little device called the TeacherMate is revolutionizing the way Ms. Flowers teaches and assesses her students. She tracks kids' performance weekly on her own laptop, and updates the games, levels, and skill sets for each student's TeacherMate, ensuring their smooth progress through the school’s math and reading curricula.

While students work silently on their own, Ms. Flowers is free to tutor children individually or in small groups, which is normally difficult when helming a classroom full of 7-year-olds.

The improvement in academic performance is dramatic, Flowers says. "I've never seen that much growth in that short a time," she told Fast Company.

Ms. Flowers and her techno-savvy first graders are not the subjects of a curious case-study. They are active participants in the early stages of an educational revolution.

THE TECH REVOLUTION IN CLASSROOMS

According to Fast Company, TeacherMate is currently being used by 500 schools in 15 states. Companies such as Google, Nokia, Palm, and Sony supply thousands of similar educational devices to schools in the United States and abroad each year. The nonprofit organization One Laptop per Child provides more than 1.3 million computers to children in underserved communities worldwide. Laptops, already ubiquitous in college classrooms, will soon be joinedby smaller handheld devices like the iPad.

Read More: http://www.takepart.com/news/2010/04/13/digital-revolution-coming-soon-to-a-classroom-near-you