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| Photo: Corinne Lestch |
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| Photo: Edgenuity's courseware. |
Some high schools incorporate blended learning strategies into their schedules, but a Rhode Island virtual charter school is using the model as the basis for its entire curriculum.
Village Green Virtual, a charter school based in downtown Providence that opened in 2013, allows its 225 students to set their own educational goals and paths through a combination of e-courseware and in-person interactions. Because it's mostly virtual, the school is unusual in that it has to rely on online methods to ensure students' gains in performance.
That's where Edgenuity — a tool that provides personalized virtual instruction — comes in. Village Green Virtual uses the product to create a library of courses that can be easily customized for students, whether they are there for remediation or acceleration.
"Edgenuity allows us to pull lessons across content areas," said John D. Butler, co-founder and director of academic planning and logistics for Village Green. "If I'm a chemistry teacher, and I'm having problems with some of my students solving an equation, I can pull from a math course a unit or lessons that are relevant to that particular section of chemistry."
Butler added that the school uses Edgenuity to tailor courses to align with annual testing, especially as schools across the state ramp up efforts to prepare students for the Next Generation Science Standards, which were adopted in 2013 and are still being implemented.
"We've been able to build, from the ground up, science courses that will align with that assessment," Butler said. "We also have access to real-time student data, so we know exactly where the student is in the curriculum and how much time they spend on the task."
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Source: EdScoop News (press release) (blog)
