21stcenturyed.com

Okay. Before I begin, full disclosure here. I work for K12, Inc. as the Director Of Instruction, where I help teachers to learn how to effectively apply our curriculum to meet the needs of their students and schools.

Having said this, I respectfully take issue with some comments that were reportedly shared by Lee Barratt, Director of Fiscal Services at Colorado’s Charter School Institute at today’s iNACOL Virtual Schools Symposium in Austin, TX. I say “reportedly” since I wasn’t there in person (alas, budget restrictions). I’m getting my information by edits made by wikispaces user alfords to the VSS Overlay wiki. Read more »

…but I can enjoy it virtually at http://vss2009.wikispaces.com/live
And now so can you!

Last year I sat in the opening keynote at NACOL’s Vitrual School Symposium while NACOL’s President Susan Patrick spoke about the emergence of WiMax in China. This will reportedly provide high-speed Internet access across a 50 kilometer radius (sixty Wimax towers would cover a state the size of Pennsylvania). This will allow China to carry out their plans to dramatically increase their use of online learning to educate their children.
So what this means is that the type of online learning you can provide in areas covered by WiMax would dramatically change. No longer will you need to worry about sticking to static images and text as the primary delivery method for students in largely rural environments. Flash-based interactive instruction is possible. So is streaming video, for that matter. Imagine how streaming video of several students at a time via web cam can close the transactional There is still an infrastructure used by many districts nationwide in the US that uses cable TV and satelite link-ups to provide this now, When this level of video instruction is used, students often have to travel to centers to access it – which is a bit at odds with one of the largest benefits of online education: accessibility.
Wimax could be a piece of the puzzle that leads to true equality in access. Kid in cities like Baltimore already benefit from having high-speed access throughout most of the city. Kids in your town can be next. All of this is possible – as long as bureaucracy and greed do not get in the way of effective and fair deals leading to equalizing access for all citizens.