Ethernotes

Breakfast with Bruce Umpstead, MDE

• State Superintendent Flanagan is on Twitter: www.twitter.com/SuptFlanagan
• Dell is using Twitter to make money through viral marketing.
• Bruce doesn’t Twitter because he doesn’t have an iPhone.
• Bruce is jealous because he can’t get to the iPhone app store. He derisively refers to his Blackberry “brick”.
• METS 2009 are in public draft on techplan.org
• Need to empower students and reduce the digital divide by allowing students phones on our networks.
• Virginia is sponsoring a student programming contest for mathematical iPhone apps.
• iTunes U is now separate from iTunes Store. State of Ohio’s top downloads are foreign language conversations, not lessons.
• There is MiLearning on iTunes U. Oakland Schools is adding media assets daily.
• Mike Flanagan’s podcasts are on iTunes U. The podcasts have been so successful that MDE created a Green Room out of a conference room.
• Bruce uses Facebook like Twitter because his Blackberry Brick has a Facebook app.
• Wikipedia came up at the State Board level. They are concerned about why schools block particular sites.
• Read the book, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation will Change the Way the World Learns MDE is taking this book seriously because of the online learning.
• Florida has taken off with their virtual learning. It works because the State of Florida pays for it. Ohio students are either online or offline. Ohio Charter Schools have out of sight course registrations.

Michigan Learns Online – Meeting the Needs of your Students by Melissa White, Ingham ISD

Navigating the Land of Online Learning 

• There are different roles you can choose to find out questions to ask about online learning from that perspective.
  • Administrators
  • Students
  • Mentors (teacher)
  • Counselors
  • Tech Coordinator
• Seat time is an issue
  • One attendee says they require attendance for tests and quizzes.
• Mentors are integral. Melissa sees more success where the mentors are hired exclusively as the online mentor. Assigning it as an additional duty to a teacher doesn’t seem to be as successful.
• Students can be online 100% as long as the district gets a seat waiver. Jenison uses it as credit recovery only so they don’t have to provide a mentor. Consequently, they haven’t addressed the seat time.
• Jenison offers MOODLE. The consensus of the session attendees is the enormous time it takes to setup a MOODLE (or Blackboard) course.
• The districts represented here seem to be picking a course or group of subject area teachers and that selection will offer the blended course.

Filed under: MACUL