Maine Virtual Learning Consortium

     I  am extremely excited to announce the launch of a Maine-based online learning consortium that will offer high quality, customized, and affordable online learning opportunities for Maine high school students starting in September 2012. The idea of creating this consortium was supported by numerous Maine schools and districts at a meeting hosted by the Maine International Center for Digital Learning (MICDL) in October. After exploring various approaches, the Maine Virtual Learning Consortium was created in January.

I hope Maine schools and districts will look into becoming one of the initial Partner Schools that will offer courses during the 2012-2013 school year. Alternatively, they may simply want to learn how your students can take courses without joining the Consortium as a full member. While Consortium courses will be comparable in many ways to the courses offered by current providers, I think Consortium courses will offer superior value due to an emphasis on the following 

Five Key Features:

1. Frequent opportunities for high levels of Interactivity between and among students and teachers,  
such as small-group real-time video discussions.

2. Strong connections to Community (the online learning community created for each course, each 
student’s local community, and the broader global community.)

3. Continuous development of a Digital Portfolio for each student.

4. Extensive use of familiar open education resources (OER), such as the Google tool set.

5. A curriculum-embedded approach to teaching Media Literacy (reading, writing, speaking, 

listening, info graphics, audio/video, Internet research, media analysis, and media ethics).

For more information, please visit www.MEVLC.org or contact me if you're interested or have questions.

Kern Kelley
kkelley@mevlc.org

Assessment in Physical Education

One of the benefits of each student having their own laptop is that it means they each have their own camera to use as an educational tool. This can save time for the teacher and involve the students in an important part of their own learning.

Here are students using their cameras to record themselves doing an archery assessment in phys ed, then store their work, scoring themselves on a rubric that the teacher can then score themselves later. The time commitment for the teacher is very little, the students do all the legwork of collecting the assessment. The phys ed teacher simply watches the videos later and scores them accordingly, as the students build their own portfolio.

South by South West Edu Conference

Two of my students presented virtually to 150 educators at the SXSW Educational Conference in Austin Texas this week. 
Thanks to Googler Tia Lendo for  inviting the kids and to Alice Barr's  kids talking about their amazing Arab Spring Project.

Students presenting to educators at SXSW Conference in Texas

The title of the event was: Using Free Google Tools to Make Learning Magical

I think it's so important for students to be a part of educational workshops and conferences. For teachers to see understand the capabilities of their students and for the students to become comfortable in professional settings presenting to groups of people.

You can find the Resources Spreadsheet here where the participants were able to add their own links to online resources they use, here are the sites that were shared: