Sign On to National School Choice Week 2012!

National School Choice Week, a grass roots effort, will be held this year from January 22-28. Activities and events sponsored throughout the nation will focus on effective education options for all children and support of school choice options in all states. This is an opportunity to educate local school boards and state legislatures about the need for education reforms that empower parents to choose the best educational environments for their children, whether those environments are public schools, public charter schools, magnet schools, virtual schools, private schools, homeschooling and more.

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Online classrooms: More teachers ride virtual circuit

The students are sitting in two different classrooms in two different schools in Arkansas.

Their teacher is working in front of a computer screen, talking to them in real-time via online video from a tiny upstairs bedroom of his Rock Island home.

This is a form of online learning, or distance education, which people mostly associate with college-level coursework.

Online teaching, like what Chapman does, is rare for kindergarten through 12th-grade education systems in this region, but it’s growing more popular elsewhere across the U.S. and the rest of the world.

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Hamburg School District: Report to the Public

The Ashley County Learning Academy at Fountain Hill is a consortium between Hamburg and Crossett School Districts. This will be its sixth year of operation. Last school year it served approximately one hundred and nine students from the two school districts. There will be slots this year for eighty students. Currently twenty four students are enrolled. The ACLA had fourteen students to receive their high school diploma, eight to receive their GED and several score proficient on the state bench mark test during the 2010-2011 school year.

The goal of the Academy is to place students in an environment that reduces the influence of factors that prevent them from learning and to provide positive support for academic success while promoting and encouraging good social skills. The staff consists of the director, counselor, four core content area teachers, two instructional aides, two mental health workers, secretary, custodian, and two cafeteria workers. Sammy Grime is our new addition to the ALE staff. He is in his second year as a science teacher.

Curriculum is delivered in classrooms in the four core subject areas by highly qualified teachers. Electives, credit recovery, preparation for the GED, and Virtual High School along with small group tutoring are also offered. This will be the third year for the JAG Program (Jobs for Arkansas Graduates). This course will provide an opportunity for students to receive much needed information and understanding of the workforce.

Social Skills are taught by each home room teacher five days a week using the ARTS Program (Aggression Regression Training). Each week students are taught a new word in social skills and learn to apply it through scenarios and by examples.

A Boot Camp is located on the Fountain Hill Campus but is not a part of the ALE Program. Boot Camp serves both school districts by providing a structured environment for disruptive and disorderly students in grades 7-12. Last year it served a combine population of twelve students from both districts.

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Upside Learning Develops Augmented Reality Cover For Elearning! Magazine

Online PR News – 06-August-2011 –The July/August issue of Elearning! Magazine featuring a cover story on Augmented Reality (AR) for Learning officially hit the news stands on July 14th, 2011. What makes this remarkable is the fact that it is the first-ever eLearning magazine to feature an interactive ‘augmented reality’ cover page. And making this possible is Upside Learning, a global leader in Custom eLearning, Mobile Learning solutions and Learning Management System. Upside Learning has been instrumental in the complete development process of the application from conceptualization to implementation.

Upside Learning has constantly strived to address the multifarious platforms in the technology space, with Augmented Reality being one of the most important ones. For some years, the company has been exploring this technology and finding the best ways to utilize it in the learning domain. It has successfully developed AR applications like Pune Layar, an augmented reality application for mobile phones developed first time for an Indian city; and AR Street Racing, a simple racing game.

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Mutually Assured Learning

First, there’s no question in my mind that for-profit entities have made important investments in the development of their virtual offerings and in doing so have upped the ante of the quality of online teaching and curricula. There is a higher bar to aim for now.

In addition, as Connections Academy co-founder Mickey Revenaugh points out in our story, districts that contract with for-profit companies like hers can offer a wider range of online options than if they had to build it all themselves. It’s not just the rural school in Arkansas that can now offer Mandarin. It’s that amazing online math curriculum that you want your students to benefit from, or the turnkey solution that will allow districts to serve families that opt out of public schooling for religious or political reasons.

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Online school registration offered by USD 470 for first time

For the first time, Arkansas City public schools will offer online school registration for students who are returning to the district.

The new online service will be available starting Monday, and will allow parents to log in via PowerSchool and register each of their returning children.

Parents also can use PowerSchool to update important information, as well as print, sign and deliver required forms to the district office at 2545 Greenway.

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Arkansas Board of Education to consider slew of charter school-related items

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — The Arkansas State Board of Education is set to consider a slew of charter school-related items.

The board is scheduled to meet Monday morning in Little Rock. One item on its agenda is a request from the Arkansas Virtual Academy in Little Rock to increase its enrollment cap from 500 to 1,500 students. The school has students from kindergarten through the eighth grade.

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Education board nixes virtual school expansion

LITTLE ROCK — The state Board of Education voted today to deny a request to expand the Arkansas Virtual Academy in Little Rock.

The school sought to raise its enrollment cap from 500 to 1,500. The state board voted 7-1 to deny the request after several members expressed reservations.

Jerry Jones, board chairman of the Arkansas Virtual Academy, speaks Monday at a state Board of Education meeting. (John Lyon photo)

The academy, known as ARVA for short, is an open-enrollment charter school that offers instruction over the Internet to students in grades K-8. It is affiliated with Virginia-based company K12, which provides most of its software.

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VirtualEDU.org Offers Online High School & Middle School Classes for Under $50 a Month

“VirtualEDU announced today that it will begin providing all of their 200 fully accredited high school online classes to students for a subscription price of just $49.95 per month. With critical funding shortfalls in all in states, we are concerned that rapidly increasing class sizes will severely reduce student learning,” stated Executive Director Dana Delane. “We are offering a class size of one through the individualized instruction that can occur through online learning to school districts, charter schools, independent schools and parents who want to see their students succeed.”

Blended learning, where students take both online and live classes, and online learning have dramatically increased in the past few years as more and more schools provide online classes for credit recovery, summer school and to offer subjects where there is no available on-site teacher. The Los Angeles Times reported that LA Unified school district has gone from just 300 students using online credit recovery last year to over 2,500 this year. According to Clayton Christensen, author of Disrupting Class, “In the year 2000, roughly 45,000 K-12 students took an online course. In 2009, more than 3 million K-12 students did.”

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Online education in Arkansas for free?

The effectiveness of the school is still measured, partially because it is fairly new to Arkansas. Sides said the model for the Virtual School was first piloted through the state Board of Education and operated from the start of 2002 through federal grants. In 2007, the Virtual Academy was chartered by the state.

Sides pointed out, again, that students are held to the same standards as other children in the public school system, adding the group at Virtual Academy has performed well on state-required performance testing. He said the effectiveness of the school is proof the system works, adding he hopes the Legislature agrees and allow more students in the system.

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