The secret to VLACS’ success may be that it does things differently from most virtual schools. It puts a focus on building strong student-teacher relationships. It breaks up traditional courses into specific skills and abilities, called “competencies,” that students master through a personalized blend of traditional lesson plans, offline projects and real-world experiences.
An interesting approach to the limitations of relationships with online coursework. It seems to be working for them, but I’ll need to do more research.
You know the drill, you’re sitting at your computer, using Gmail, and need to go to another message but your mouse is way over there. Ugh, lifting your hand is such a pain. What if I told you there was a way to navigate and manage Gmail almost entirely by the keyboard? Would you believe…
Now here’s the puzzle: We can’t actually teach it. ‘Teaching’ imagination is like giving away the answers. It’s like spoon feeding. Students have to use and trust their own imagination in order to exercise it. It’s a path they have to take on their own. Sure, we can guide them through the process, but it’s their…
Apple has been making a push for the iPads in the classroom, and their latest salvo is an iPad that works with the Apple Pencil and Logitech Crayon. Unfortunately for Apple, I don’t believe the new iPad and the push for multimedia creation will be enough to sway schools from the lure of Chromebooks. To…
The other thing that is not entirely obvious is that Playgrounds has full access to the entire iOS API. This means that there is effectively no limit on the complexity of Playground that you can build. You can use APIs like Core Location, WebKit, MapKit, Core Motion, Networking and Core Bluetooth. One of the demos…
Pre-orders for first Ubuntu Tablet went on sale on Monday with a shipping date of mid-April. I hesitated for maybe 10 minutes before putting in an order for the high resolution model ($340). I ran Ubuntu for about 18 months before going back to OS X, so I’m already comfortable with the operating system, but why…
Delaying school start times has been universally touted as the answer to the growing epidemic of teenage sleep deprivation, but this common orthodoxy may be based in false ideas about how teen biological clocks really work. The argument for later start times hinges on the fact that teenagers prefer to go to bed and sleep in…
