Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Ohio DL Schools

         If I had to pick a DL for my child, I would choose Virtual School House. VSH had a very inviting and easy to navigate website. The first thing I noticed about VSH was the willingness to help students with special education services. They have many options for 504 plans and IEPs and they also have IEP teams. Another thing that I found to be important was VSH's involvement in PBIS, which is positive behavior support systems. They offer many online LIVE tutoring sessions, and there are field trips where students' can get together with their classmates. VSH, overall, had a very well laid out website and was user friendly. They used words and phrases that parents can understand, but they also used information that certified personnel would understand, with given explanations for parents or anyone else who might not understand.

            One DL I would not use for my student, if they were young, would be ECOT. I felt that the website was very overwhelming and wordy. I got lost and found myself not interested in reading what they had to say. Also, recently, there have been articles about the ineffectiveness and poor testing scores that ECOT has been receiving. However, ECOT might be more beneficial for older students' who are going back to high school, or finishing up a GED. In the article I added below from the Columbus Dispatch, it mentions ECOT ranking in the top 10 largest schools, however students graduating on time is extremely low. While I realize a lot of online schools work with students who have dropped out of school, I feel like online schools should want to try harder and entice their students to  wanting to be interested in school. Learning is supposed to be fun and interactive, and I feel like the numbers that have been mentioned in the article do not prove that they are trying everything they can to make learning "fun." Also, I did not see a detailed special education section on their website. Special Education is important, especially for online schools, because interventions need to be used, as well as differentiated instruction and UDL. Online schools need to show and prove to parents and students that they want to help their child succeed and that they are willing to do all that is possible to make this happen.

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2015/01/04/popular-ecot-poor-performer.html

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