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.
The Google Cast for education app is now available. To try it out, teachers need to install the Google Cast for Education app, and the students need to install the Google Cast extension. There are three caveats right now: The Chromebooks must be in the Beta channel, running ChromeOS 52 or newer. This won’t be the…
UPDATE October 2020 – Google Sheets now has a randomize range option. I’ve also created a video demonstrating the randomize range option. Use the randomize range option With the randomize range option, it’s a piece of cake to randomize a list of students. Let’s say you have a list of students: To randomize the range,…
When Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA spying, the term metadata came up. Metadata is the bits of information attached to a piece of intelligence. For example, a phone call has metadata data attached to it such as the date and time of the call, who was making the call, who received the call,…
Scratch Blocks brings together two different programming “grammars” that we have designed over the past decade. The standard Scratch grammar uses blocks that snap together vertically, much like LEGO bricks. For our ScratchJr software, intended for younger children, we developed blocks that are labelled with icons rather than words, and snap together horizontally rather than…
