Presented by Cynthia Hyland and Miguel Santa from William Penn SD

William Penn uses blendedschools to better differentiate instruction for all students in an affordable way. Using some credit recovery, or extra credit. They provide three models - full time, summer school and blended (part time). THeir blended option allows the students to take ONE class through blackboard. Summer program brings the students into the school building and runs 6 to 8 weeks.

They use the Wimba LiveClassroom all day. The students are expected to be in the LiveClassroom 8-3. Available all day for support and monitoring. Clases are held in real time. (I wonder how they schedule it - how are teachers allocated? Must assign blended as a specific duty or in place of traditional?) They indicate that it provides a greater opportunity for students to freely ask questions of the teacher either within the classroom or through a private message. IN the traditional classroom students are sometimes afraid to ask questions.

There are a couple of cool new features in the LiveClassroom including the ability to either manually or automatically move students into ‘breakout’ rooms and a couple of new response tools. Also has built in video. I don’t recall if that feature was in the previous generation or not. The video actually tracks the person talking so when someone hits the talk video its their video that gets pushed out to the other users.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 10:55 am and is filed under Emerging Technologies, Educational Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.