Schools Start Blending Face-to-Face And Online Learning

Jonathan Schorr and Deborah McGriff, writing over at Education Next.org discuss the new ways that schools are blending face-to-face and online learning

From Jonathan Schorr and Deborah McGriff at EducationNext.org:

The way the 1st graders hurtle toward their computer workstations, you’d think they were headed out to recess.

It’s an unseasonably warm winter morning in San Jose, California, and the two dozen students at Rocketship Mateo Sheedy Elementary School get situated quickly in the computer lab, donning headphones and peering into monitors displaying their names. The kindergartners follow a moment later, until 43 seats are filled. The effect is of a miniature, and improbably enthusiastic, call center.

This lab—and the larger plan for the school surrounding it—has probably done more than any other single place to create enthusiasm for “hybrid schools.” Such schools combine “face-to-face” education in a specific place (what used to be called “school”) with online instruction. (Rocketship uses the term “hybrid,” rather than the increasingly prevalent term “blended learning,” because the computers are not actually “blended” with face-to-face instruction in the same classroom.) It’s a sign of how young the hybrid and blended field is that this school at the epicenter hails all the way back to 2007.

Schorr and McGriff continue by discussion Rocketship Education, a small but burgeoning network of charter schools that serves an overwhelmingly low-income immigrant community in San Jose.  Rocketship has made a name through its, forgive the phrase, high-flying student performance. Two of its three schools are old enough to have test scores. They rank among the 15 top-performing high-poverty schools statewide, and the site that opened in 2009 was the number-one first-year school in the state in the high-poverty category. But what positions Rocketship on the cutting edge of school reform is its vision for how technology will integrate with, and change, the structure of the school.

Although the kids are engaged in the online lesson, no one is claiming that time in front of the computer is directly responsible for the extraordinary performance of Rocketship students. Rather, the online work is essential to the long-term vision for the school’s instructional model, and also for Rocketship’s growth trajectory. Crucially, the lab requires an adult who has experience with children, but no teaching credential (nor, indeed, bachelor’s degree) is required.

For this class, it’s a young mother named Coral De Dios, who dispenses help and order as the moment requires. Her ability to monitor the 43 kids here means that the school requires less staff, ultimately saving hundreds of thousands of dollars each year that can be plowed back into resources for the school, including staff salaries. In cash-strapped California, that’s no small matter.

Rocketship and the other school models Schorr and McGriff describe here offer a vision for what deeply integrated technology can mean for children’s education, for the way schools are structured, and for the promise of greater efficiency amid a lengthy economic downturn. This is much more than simply taking a class online. Already, millions of children take one or more online courses, ranging from credit recovery to Advanced Placement.

Read the full story from EducationNext.org right here.