Project Update - May 2007
Mission 1: Expand Curriculum Available to WSSB Students
Partnership with the Washington Digital Learning Commons (DLC)
Beginning the fall of 2003, we have had access to the courses, tools and resources of the DLC. For the first two years, as part of the pilot group, these resources were free to WSSB. Starting fall of 2005, there has been a nominal charge for the resources.
Online Courses
There are about 300 high-quality classes in a broad range of subject areas offered by some of the country’s best online course providers. These providers have many factors in common: All course are taught by an actual instructor (none are self-taught), they all are NCAA accredited, and all meet national standards in their curriculum area. The classes are available in seven content areas: Arts, Business, ESL, Foreign Language, Interdisciplinary, Language Arts, Lifeskills-Health, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, Technology and Vocational. Students must register through WSSB’s Mentor/Registrar to take these online courses. Classes cost between $200 and $800, depending on the provider (an average of 20% off their full price). WSSB will have Course Credit Funds to offset a portion of that cost to the student/parents, available for scholarship request.
Library Tools
The DLC Library is an online library that contains resources for use in your teaching and professional development. Students, teachers, and parents can discover and use magazine and newspaper articles, movie clips, photographs, animations, and sound files at home or at school. It includes a variety of databases containing an exciting collection of resources. Some of the more useful, and frequented, tools are the Grolier Online, Facts on File and NetTrekker di. These research tools make use of easier to use layouts that allow a blind student to find the information they are looking for, from a quality and reputable site, in a much easier fashion.
College & Career Planning
The DLC College and Career Planning resources will help you and your students discover information about thousands of careers, colleges, majors, and scholarships. The resources allow a student to begin with his or her interests and talents, match them to careers, and engage in long-term planning for a fulfilling and rewarding future in employment. Job listings are included for those students who need a local job, right now.
Students and their counselors, teachers, and parents can learn what training is needed for a wide range of careers, which colleges or universities offer the best training and education, how to achieve high scores on the SATs, how to get into the college of choice, and how to find scholarships and grants.
There are nearly 250 post-secondary institutions in Washington State. Look for four year colleges, community or technical colleges, or specialty institutions. You can also link to sites that list schools across the United States and internationally. Additionally, you can search for jobs on WorkSource, a Washington State Employment Division tool.
Course Development Tools (Catalyst)
The easy-to-use DLC tools help students, parents, and educators collaborate on projects, communicate outside of class, and build online communities. The tools facilitate a variety of projects, such as creating online portfolios, developing Web pages, and improving student writing.
The Portfolio tool allows students to present their work online to their peers, parents, teachers, and even potential college admissions officers. The tool lets them use the Web to display everything from papers, pictures, and video-without any special training in the complexities of Web publishing.
EPost Discussion Board provides educators and students with an online discussion board to exchange ideas outside of class, any time, and from any Internet-connected computer. This will help students stay in contact with their teachers-even when school is not in session-and will open up new opportunities for students to learn from each other as they discuss coursework.
Peer Review enables students to collaborate online by providing a forum for focused discussion of student writing. Students can post, review, and comment on each other's work via a Web interface. The tool also allows comments to be made on the whole work, on a paragraph, or on a sentence.
WebQ is a survey tool can be used to conduct online quizzes, surveys or questionnaires. Instructors can use a variety of question formats: True/false, multiple choice, short answer, essay, and many more.
Mission 2: Open WSSB Curriculum to Off-Campus Students
VHS Participation
During the 2003-2004 school year, WSSB’s Language Arts instructor, Theresa Tate took the NetCourse Instructional Methodologies (NIM) training from the Virtual High School – the nations premier online school out of Massachusetts. Through this process, she prepared to instruct her course Poetry Writing online during the 2004-2005 school year. WSSB’s intent was to enroll its own student in her course along with the other VHS students – all regular education students from member schools around the US.
This project was well received. Fall semester the course had 5 students from WSSB in a class that totaled 11, with students from New Jersey, Massachusetts, Texas, New Hampshire and Georgia. Spring semester started with 2 students from WSSB (one an extension student – see Mission 1) in a class that is the maximum total of 25, with students from New Jersey, Massachusetts, Washington, California, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire and Florida (an international school with the two students taking poetry actually in Brazil and the Dominican Republic).
The WSSB students who took the course first semester were very excited about having classmates from the public school sector, and from around the US. Class interaction, peer review and high expectations led to a very successful experiment.
Currently, Ms. Tate is rewriting her class and will be delivering it through WSSB instead of VHS. It is our hope to be able to offer this class to other schools for the blind as well as our Washington outreach students.
Mission 3: Provide Professional Development Courses
K-20 Video Conferencing
This portion of the project was actually the first part to get underway. Our intent was to quickly move curriculum we already had in place to a digital delivery format, and we did so by taking two of our Braille courses that had been taught before and teaching them again, but using the state’s K-20 video conferencing set-up for delivery.
During 2007 offered two well attended sections of Literary Braille Refresher and one section of Abacus. We have expanded our delivery of professional development and included Colorado as a site for our Abacus class.
Mission 4: Create a Resource Reservoir
Video Vignettes
The idea for this portion of the project is to create a series of small instructional video clips that gives basic information about the various expanded core curriculum items that we teach to blind children. These are available online through our website. The collection is up to four titles: Pouring Liquids, Folding Money, Self-Medicating, and Sighted Guide Technique.
Due to the generosity of The Community Foundation and The Anderson Family Trust we have the funding we need to continue this wonderful project. Our next video will be White Cane Techniques, which we hope will be on the website before June 2007.
On-line Learning Consortium for the Blind and Visually Impaired
From our original idea to create a website that would act as a ‘one-stop shopping’ center for blind consumers, family and program personnel has come the gathering of a small group to begin discussion of such a project. Along with WSSB, Hadley School (in Chicago), the Carroll Center (in Boston), the Foundation for Blind Children (in Phoenix) backed by a grant from the Gibney Foundation has formed the OLCBVI to move forward with this plan.
This consortium is in the process of building a ‘portal’ site where members can work together to provide tools and services to the whole range of individuals who are blind and visually impaired, those working with the blind/visually impaired and for parents. This online resource center will include information about blindness and compensatory skills, community areas for discussion and dialog, coursework and training, and many additional resources added during development. Our pursuit will be for a sustainable mixture of private, grant & government funding that will make this ‘pipeline’ an enduring resource.