TEA announced that our Vision 2020 Cycle 2 Collaborative for Virtual Learning has been funded. We at the service center who are working with the grant are thrilled. We feel that the experience that we have had with vision 2020 Cycle 1 will help us and make the second grant even smoother than the first.
We still see that virtual learning is an important part of education both now and in the future. Working with TxVSN as courses are made available has been a very interesting and rewarding activity.
Wikipedia Roll is a new site I read about which helps users organize and utilize the vast amount of information on Wikipedia. I searched for "Texas" and look at what it returned:
{Texas}
He brings up the disconnect between the TA TEKS and what districts really want students to learn and do with district computers. I feel that districts are accomplishing their own goals but perhaps these goals do not align with the older TA TEKS.
ESC Region 11 currently has a two-year Vision 2020 grant which is helping 6 districts get started with online courses through the TxVSN. We received the grant this fall and have had one full semester of implementation. My reflections so far:
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Writing and beginning to implement a grant for an entity that was trying to get started at the same time has been a real challenge.
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For example, when meeting with a middle school principal with discussion and communication in mind, his comment was "Well, now I understand...you really don't know any more than I do about specifics." and he was right....I had (and still have) no idea what the course offerings for middle school are going to look like.
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Budgeting for amounts for student courses when the amounts are unknown and will fluctuate according to different providers can not be absolute but must be flexible.
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Estimating students who will attend is a moving target due to the TxVSN catalog being an imaginary document when the grant was written.
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Communication with participating stakeholders is an educational process since this "online" grant wants to use the interent as the "online" communication tool and our stakeholders must be trained to access, discuss, and communicate online.
More later.
What is technology integration in the classroom? What are some examples happening on your campus?
Posted by Norma Smith at 1:00 PM
Do you exibit any "digital immigrant" characteristics? Post one or more.
Posted by Norma Smith at 1:00 PM
