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The debate over digital learning will soon enter a new phase.  No longer will educators debate whether or not digital learning has the capacity to transform the American education system.   Just about gone are the anti-technology Luddites who insist that every classroom be self-contained, with students and teachers left to their own devices, save for the help of pencils, chalk, blackboards and weighty textbooks stuffed into 10 kilo backpacks.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that digital learning systems can be tailored to the specific interests, learning styles, and levels of accomplishment of each student.

On the one side will be those who propose that most digital learning in K-12 public education be of the “blended” variety, that is, take place within public school classrooms under the tutelage of a highly qualified teacher.

What started as a desire to know what technology access my students had turned into a great opportunity to get to know them, and what they thought about grades, learning, and their interests. Here’s a copy of the survey that I gave my s

Colorado State University offers a useful guide to reading on the web. While it is aimed at college students, much of the information is pertinent to readers of all ages and could easily be part of lessons in the classroom. The following list includes some of the CSU strategies to strengthen reading comprehension, along with my thoughts on how to incorporate them into classroom instruction: Synthesize online reading into meaningful chunks of information. In my classroom, we spend a lot of time talking about how to summarize a text by finding pertinent points and casting them in one’s own words. The same strategy can also work when synthesizing information from a web page. Use a reader’s ability to effectively scan a page, as opposed to reading every word. We often give short shrift to the ability to scan, but it is a valuable skill on may levels. Using one’s eye to sift through key words and phrases allows a reader to focus on what is important. Avoid distractions as much as necessary. Readbility is one tool that can make this possible. Advertising-blocking tools are another effective way to reduce unnecessary, and unwanted, content from a web page. At our school, we use Ad-Block Plus as a Firefox add-on to block ads. Understand the value of a hyperlink before you click the link. This means reading the destination of the link itself. It is easier if the creator of the page puts the hyperlink into context, but if that is not the case, then the reader has to make a judgment about the value, safety, and validity of the link. One important issue to bring into this discussion is the importance of analyzing top-level domains. A URL that ends in .gov, for example, was created by a government entity in the U.S. Ask students what it means for a URL to end in .edu. What about .org? .com? Is a .edu or .org domain necessarily trustworthy? Navigate a path from one page in a way that is clear and logical. This is easier said than done, since few of us create physical paths of our navigation. However, a lesson in the classroom might do just that: draw a map of the path a reader goes on an assignment that uses the web. That visualization of the tangled path might be a valuable insight for young readers.

The AP Computer Science course is running as an online/blended course

the first our school has offered. I have no training in teaching an online class, but I’m doing the best I can with what I have.

I MISS seeing my students on a daily basis.