Georgia Cyber Academy (High School) – Online Information Session

So last night I attended an online information session for the Georgia Cyber Academy (GCA) that was focused on their high school program (last night I attended the information session for their K-8 program).  The session began with the moderator doing some using Elluminate items, and then began with a description of the school.

I missed this last night, so…  Odyssey Charter School was the first charter school in Georgia, approved by the Georgia State Board of Education in 2001.  The GCA was added (also chartered by the Georgia State Board of Education) in 2007.  This is the first year for the high school grades.  When they first began they had around 3000 students, and for the coming year they will have 6600 students from K-9.

The next section was a description of K12, Inc. (which I missed last night as well).  K12, Inc. is the “largest provider of online curriculum for public virtual charter schools.”  They current have 27 statewide programs and 3 city-wide programs serving over 70,000 students.

The rest of the session was fairly similar as the one last night (so I won’t go into details here because they are included in my previous entry). This included:

• an overview of the GCA program
• the instructional model used (with screen shots)
• a discussion of the nature of the curriculum and textbook (with screen shots)
• the testing regime (with screen shot)
• the synchronous or “live classes” and labs (with screen shots)
• sources of student support (with screen shots)
• tools for the student and parent to track the students progress (with screen shots)
• how students submit assignments (with screen shots)
• activities available for students from the GCA and K12, Inc. community

One of the things that was a little different was how this actually looked for a student.  Students can obviously login to their system anywhere they have a computer and Internet.  However, there is an expectation that students will complete 5 lessons a week per course and be working on their online schooling for roughly 6-8 hours per day.  Teachers are available during live office hours and there are “live sessions as needed”.  There are an “average 2-3 hours of optional live events” – I assume per week.

There was also a very specific and direct slide and discussion about “Is it right for you?” and the discussion focused on the fact that there is an expectation that the high school students should be more self-directed than the elementary or middle school students.  The moderator indicated that if parents did not have their students attending with them today, that they should view the recording before signing up to make sure they understood what it was they were signing up for.

There were fewer participants this morning than last night – which I attribute to the fact that today it was during the 9-5 day, whereas last evening was after work hours, and the fact that today it just focused on the newly added grade nine, whereas last evening was focused on grades K-8 (plus I suspect many/most of the grade nine students were in the program last year).

The questions topics included:

• how to obtain computers for students
• pacing and scheduling school work
• access to foreign language courses this year [and the answer was yes, there are foreign language courses available as electives]
• whether 4H would be available this year and, if so, for what grade level (and having lived for 4 years in Georgia, I understand how important 4H is) [and yes, it is available]
• a series of enrollment questions, including the enrollment process for existing students [yes, the process for enrollment for students who completed grade 8 with GCA still need to register in the same way]
• k-mail and e-mail [all academic and school-related correspondence will be sent through k-mail (which is the e-mail system within their course management system), the only messages that may be sent to the regular e-mail address are social activities]
• the availability of middle school students to take a high school foreign language course [at present, the state isn’t paying for this so parents who want this option can pay for it as a supplemental option]

That was basically it…  Again I want to thank the moderator, who I informed who I was and what I was doing at the beginning of the session and she allowed me to stay in the Elluminate room.  Overall, it was fairly consistent with the K-8 session, and with the other cyber charter school information sessions I have attended.  The main differences between the K-8 and the high school appears to be the amount of required synchronous time and the role of and amount of work required of the learning coach (in fact, during the high school session I don’t even recall hearing the term learning coach).

Anyway, thanks again to the moderator, GCA and K12, Inc. for allowing me to sit in on a couple of these sessions.