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| Digital Directions |
In this issue, senior writer Michelle R. Davis examines the digital innovation and academic accountability balancing act many schools are addressing, and the new approaches emerging through experimentation.
See how schools are learning to create a culture of teaching and learning that embraces the process of thoughtful trial and error, similar to the way research scientists work or how new technologies are created.
Michelle R. Davis writes, "Five days a week, high school students stream into a building that once housed the old San Francisco Press Club. A biometric fingerprint scanner takes attendance as they enter a building adorned with wooden wainscoting and fireplaces. Students access their laptops under crystal chandeliers and study digital content in the club’s old reading room, which still features a mahogany bar."
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| Photo: Digital Directions |
While the setting evokes an older era, the San Francisco Flex Academy charter school is thoroughly modern. Though the students attend school every day, their courses are offered through an online curriculum accessed through students’ laptop computers. But Flex Academy also has teachers of core subjects—English, history, math, and science—on site, who meet with small groups of students throughout the day to troubleshoot areas where students are lagging, based on information collected by online assessments.
Across the country, the numbers of hybrid or blended charter schools are on the rise. Loosely based on the idea of combining face-to-face education with online instruction, these hybrid charters can often look very different. Some are primarily virtual schools that have added a limited face-to-face component. At others, like Flex Academy, students attend school in person daily.
Of course, many of these models are still in their infancy and remain unproven. And the focus can’t be on the latest technology, argue educators such as John Danner, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Rocketship Education, an elementary charter school that serves more than 1,000 students on three different campuses in San Jose, Calif., and combines face-to-face instruction with online learning. Instead, he says the focus must be on what truly works for students.
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Source: Digital Directions
