Education Week - Sizing Up: Blended Learning - (Page S4)

Every school in our district has its own unique needs. And even if you have a device and Internet for every student, it doesn't necessarily mean that the blended part of home learning will happen." TIM GOREE Director of technology support services, Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District HOME DISCONNECT INEQUITIES HURT BLENDED MODELS By Amanda M. Fairbanks Photos by Peter Hoffman When leaders of VOISE Academy High School couldn't find a reliable way to bring technology to students in their homes, they came up with a workaround-they brought students to the technology. Many students at the high school, located in a poor neighborhood on Chicago's West Side, lack reliable Internet in their residences, and sending devices home with them was not a realistic option. So officials at the school opened the facility to students on Saturdays, giving them access to a safe, Web-connected hub where they could work on lessons that required technology. Blended learning is generally defined as the effort to integrate technology-based lessons alongside traditional, person-to-person instruction. But some schools and districts face daunting obstacles in trying to ensure that blended learning takes place at home, not just in the classroom. Those barriers include concerns that the devices will be lost or stolen, and worries that impoverished students do not have access to the Web at home, creating inequities. The Chicago school's strategy is just one example of the creative and unconventional efforts being tried around the country meant to extend the amount of time that students can spend on blended learning. Giving individual devices to students has been "a huge safety concern," explained Todd Yarch, VOISE Academy's principal. So is unreliable Web access: "If they take the laptop home and there's no Internet, what good is it?" Today, districts' efforts to bring blended learning home include not only giving students access to Internet-connected schools after hours, but also providing them with Wi-Fi connections on school buses and in other out-of-school locations, and asking educators to encourage students to engage in tech-based study away from school. The Fairfield-Suisun Unified school sys- tem, a socioeconomically diverse district of about 22,000 students halfway between Sac- ramento and San Francisco, also weighed security concerns as it prepared to launch a 1-to-1 computing program last fall. District officials pilot-tested the idea of distributing iPads in one of the school system's most impoverished communities. Initially fearing that the iPads would be stolen, the district required that the devices be kept on school grounds. But later, they decided to let students take them home-after concluding that worries about security were overblown. The focus of districts should be making sure that blended learning can happen "all the time," explained Tim Goree, the district's director of technology support services. "Every school in our district has its own unique needs," he noted. "And even if you have a device and Internet for every student, it doesn't necessarily mean that the blended part of home learning will happen." Limited research exists on the extent to which tech-based blended learning plays out in home environments to the same degree it does on school grounds. But preliminary findings from a study un- derway by the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a Seattle-based policy-research group run out of the University of Washington's Bothell campus, suggests that many schools are struggling to solidify the home piece of the puzzle. Lawrence J. Miller, a senior research fellow at the center, is working on the study, which will examine the effectiveness of blended learning programs. Though final results are not due to be released until this spring, among 17 schools using blended learning that were reviewed, 13 didn't require students to devote any time to online, off-campus work. Among the four other schools, the numbers varied widely-with students completing an average of 30 to 80 minutes of online study per night. On the whole, Mr. Miller found that the S4 | EDUCATION WEEK: SIZING UP BLENDED LEARNING > www.edweek.org/go/blended-learning JANUARY 29, 2014 Marcus Stallworth, 15, came to VOISE Academy for one of the school's Saturday study sessions earlier this year to prepare for his finals. The students who show up at the Chicago public school's weekend sessions include those who need to make up missed work or pull up low grades, and others, like Marcus, who want access to school resources. http://www.edweek.org/go/blended-learning

Education Week - Sizing Up: Blended Learning

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - Sizing Up: Blended Learning