Happy Presidents' Day and a bit of news re MNPS Virtual School

Things move apace here at MNPS Virtual School. Though it's a holiday for students and a Professional Day for teachers, our whole team (5 dynamic individuals) are each and every one of us in to work today, working working working. We are providing a valuable service to district students over this upcoming Spring "Intersession" the first week of the district's first two-week long Spring Break and Spring Break itself), providing "Bridge Math Intensive," our first real foray into the world of Blended Learning. Students, for a nominal registration fee, will complete in two weeks a course normally running a full 18 week semester. It will be online, but every morning of the 9 days the students attend our physical School, they will work mornings with two stellar online (and classroom) math teachers, then after lunch they will attend intense Math Lab and continue working in small groups with yet another wonderful teacher.

Bridge Math Intensive--and the intensive effort it will require on the part of teachers, administration, and students--will be of particular help to Seniors who may only lack that 5th math in order to graduate on time.

This is what continually amazes me about the teachers with whom we work. Sure, it's an opportunity for them to pick up a little extra money over their Break, but believe me, they are not doing it for the money. They care. They care deeply. In addition to customized registration procedures for BMI (no, not the songwriter's licensing agency--Bridge Math Intensive), we're working this week to open registration for our Summer Success Program, an 8 week fee-based (and no, funding does not happen for summer school locally or, to my knowledge, anywhere in the state) during which students will complete a half-credit course (often one semester of a year long class) for credit. This will require its own set of procedures and mechanisms for registration and delivery. Finally, we're working on new mechanisms and procedures for registration for school year 2013-14. I posted on Facebook last week a status that may have sounded a bit smug or facetious, but I meant every word of it. To quote:

Scott Merrick -- February 13 in Nashville

I'm so glad to be in a workplace where all team members are recognized for their contributions and talents and where continuous improvement is more than a buzz phrase--it's an ever-present challenge and imperative. Thanks MNPS Virtual School and Metro Nashville Public Schools.

Be sure to tune in to Newschannel5+ (Comcast channel 250 locally) Wednesday night at 7PM until 8 to watch our esteemed Principal, Dr. James Witty, and our similarly esteemed District Superintendent of Schools Dr. Jesse Register answer community questions about Virtual School and the way we're doing it here in Nashville Public Schools: We believe we're constantly improving the right way to do it.

 Back to work, y'all. No rest for the innovative. Happy Presidents' Day!

Bathwater, No Baby

I've spent portions of this week working to update our school's website at http://vlearn.mnps.org to reflect the realities surrounding the start up of Spring 2013's semester. I'm most proud of the faculty page at http://www.vlearn.mnps.org/Page83425.aspx, which displays the smiling faces of the 25 adjunct teachers who will facilitate the progress of our (nearly 100 now) full-time online students and our part-timers in the 23 MNPS high schools we serve, along with the handful of beta program middle schools where we have Middle Schoolers taking high school courses for advanced high school credit. These dedicated human beings are mostly full-time MNPS teachers, with a few retired ones and a few out of county teachers. Without exception, they believe in the future of online learning enough to take on more work in their work day in order to pioneer it.

This past week, it came to my attention that there is a small group of legislators who are mounting an initiative to (once again) ban virtual schools in our fair State. This seems to be a backlash from the documented failures of commercial providers' efforts in Tennessee, as noted in the following Google search results for "Tennessee Virtual School:"

1. For-profit virtual school drawing ire of TN lawmakers - WSMV ...

   www.wsmv.com/.../for-profit-virtual-school-drawing-ire-of-tn...Share

   Sep 3, 2012 – Virtual schools are a relatively new, but a growing option, for education across Tennessee. Metro Schools started a public virtual school in 2010 ...
2. PolitiFact Tennessee | Chattanooga senator slaps virtual school ...

   www.politifact.com/tennessee/.../chattanooga-senator-slaps-virt...

   Oct 7, 2012 – More recently, Berke has led the charge against the state law allowing for "virtual schools" to set up shop in Tennessee counties. As the ...
3. TN virtual school draws criticism | wbir.com

   www.wbir.com/news/article/.../TN-virtual-school-draws-criticis...

   TN virtual school draws criticism. 10:26 AM, Sep 10, 2012 | comments. Tennessee Virtual Academy student Jalea Slater, 8, left, takes a spelling test from her ...
4. 
   

   
   

   Tennessee senator calls for inquiry of virtual school citing low test ...

   www.commercialappeal.com/.../tennessee-senator-calls-for-inq...

   Aug 31, 2012 – A Chattanooga senator is pressing for an inquiry into the for-profit Tennessee Virtual Academy after seeing test scores he describes as 'dismal..."

   While these news and blog posts seem to point to a failure of online learning in our state, I want to go on record to suggest that Senator Berke and others would be doing a total disservice to the future of education in Tennessee to revert to the past prior to 2010, when it was against the law to educate students online. At MNPS Virtual School, the first official virtual Public School in our State, we have been tirelessly working since 2009 to craft sets of policies, processes, and courses that not only work for students, but that provide in many cases more rigorous, more challenging, and more academically engaging educational experiences for students than those available in bricks and mortar classrooms, be they public or private or in homeschool situations. 
   

   Our Principal, Dr. James Witty, comes to us from an accomplished career dedicated to Alternative Education.  As stated on our school's "Administration and Staff" page, Dr. Witty ",,,brings a wealth of experience and expertise in nontraditional educational methods. He most recently managed more than 60 educational reform initiatives for Metro Schools as the Race to the Top Grant Manager for MNPS. Previously, he served as the Director of the Center for Dropout Prevention, creating and launching a resource center for the Tennessee Department of Education. Dr. Witty also has expertise in out-of-school learning, previously serving as a Director for Extended Learning for the Murfreesboro City School District."

   At ISTE 2009 in Denver, Colorado, Dr. Kecia Ray, MNPS Executive Director for Instructional Technology and now incoming ISTE President, approached my dear wife Lee Ann on the veranda of her sister's historic Denver home during a party, looked her in the eye and told her "I'm going to steal your husband." She clarified that she intended to "steal" me away from my 14 year career at University School of Nashville to help her make her vision for online learning work for our school district's 80,000+ students. Along with Coordinator Barbara Thoeming, I began this labor of love within the month. We nurtured options along as a program with a small dedicated team until laws changed, we became a School, and Barbara moved along elsewhere in her career, making room for Dr. Witty to come on board, similarly walking away from his own successful and contributive career to help turn vision into reality.

   
   

   As of yesterday, we are serving right at 700 individual class "seats" to our students with a staff of 5 full-time professionals and 25 Adjunct Teachers. We offer a new paradigm of accountability with our "Performance = Attendance" policies. We have in place a communication system of "Performance Concern" which supports students in a timely and effective manner through communication with parents, school counselors, and students. We underscore every module in every online course with a "Discussion Based Assessment" graded in accordance with a rubric made available to students even before they sign in to their course for the first time. This DBA is simply a structured (telephone or Skype call) conversation between instructor and student about the learning they have just mastered. We offer 24/7 online tutoring to many of our students via Grade Results. Our teachers deliver regular tutoring opportunities in our Thomas W. Hatfield Student Success Center up until 5 pm after school on a regular basis. We provide in-person orientations for teachers, students, and parents, supported by separate 50+ page handbooks for Full-Time and Part-Time students. We are continually evolving in the spirit of student support and accountability. We rock.
   

   

   Thomas W. Hatfield Student Success Center at MNPS Virtu@l School

   Come see us, Senator Berke: We are open for the business of learning and teaching. Please don't throw out our baby with your bathwater.

Congrats to Our Pioneer Class of 2011! AGAIN!

This is what I'm talking about. Congratulations to our seven graduating seniors amongst the class of 39 graduation seniors at Middle College High School! Thanks also to our parents for support and to our legislators for opening up the path to our actually being a SCHOOL. And what a school it will be. Stay tuned!



and watch them walk!

Congrats to Our Pioneer Class of 2011!

I'm proud enough to bust, and I'll be shaking the hands of these 7 pioneering virtual learners onstage on Monday. They're off into the world(s) after that! I've been building out a space in ReactionGrid, not yet available to our learners, but it will be. I took a few minutes to add a lasting tribute to these students that their future schoolmates will enjoy for years to come:

Virtual Learning Student Asks U.S. Office of Educational Technology...

...Two Questions

I was greatly pleased to be present at the recent SITE (Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education) Conference here in Nashville as my dear friend Kecia Ray (and also my boss, in her role as MNPS Executive Director of Instructional Technology) and our student Taylor Grantham sat in on "A Conversation with Karen Cator." Along with them were two other educators, one from Wisconsin and one from Denmark.

It was a stellar hour, and I left with heightened appreciation for the work Ms. Cator is doing and also with something else--video! Filmed by colleague and pal Norman Merrifield, it serves as a reminder of just how good media can be when you enlist a professional videographer who wields professional gear. I'm posting the following videos, each a question from Miss Grantham and an answer from Ms. Cator!

 

Web 2.0 for US! Session at Martin Professional Development Center 101910

I had a great time yesterday facilitating an all-day Web 2.0 (and beyond) session for 18 MNPS teachers. The participants were a very nicely balanced mix of elementary, middle, and high school teachers and we got right into it at 8:37 a.m. The class was supposed to get underway at 8:30 but my watch (this has never before happened) inexplicably stopped at 8:16 and I kept glancing at it thinking, "we have a few more minutes" until I thought "It's been 8:16 for quite some time. Has time stopped?"

Off we went. The session was guided by the PowerPoint/GooglePresentation embedded here and underscored by dialog in a live chat room at http://chatterous.com. I have now pasted the chat log into slides at the end of the pressie and added a few replies to questions or comments I didn't see because I was sharing my little heart out up front of the room. The final slide shares a bit of my own reflection on the day's work.

Please take a few minutes (11, which you will not regret) to view the Ken Robinson presentation we started the day with, because as I said, "I want you to know where I'm coming from..."

Thanks again to all my wonderful new colleagues and my hearty encouragement to you to keep the faith and keep your change moving in the right direction. On of our main support structures at Virtual Learning is "Do the next right thing for our students." You know what it is. You are good teachers.

Here is: