A virtual school is an institution that teaches courses entirely through online methods. These schools offer many different classes at every different grade levels. One very known virtual school is the Florida Virtual School. It was founded in 1997 by Julie Young. There are an online elementary, middle, and high school program. FLVS is free to Florida residents who fund the program though state taxes. For 2 semesters of courses the fee is $750. Some of the courses they offer are Keyboarding, Language Arts, Reading, Spanish, Math, U.S. History, Web Design, English, Latin, Chinese, Algebra, Biology, Economics, and Physics.
Cyber education has many other advantages:
• It permits students in small, rural, or low-wealth school districts to take specialized courses that would ordinarily not be available to them.
• It provides home schooled students with instruction in subjects their parents might not be able to teach, such as foreign languages or computer skills.
• It meets the needs of school phobics, those in hospitals or recovering at home, dropouts who would like to get back in, expelled students, single parents, and students in other states or even other countries looking for nontraditional educational solutions.
• And, in an age when many of our schools are overcrowded or crumbling, cyber learning makes financial sense, too, because schools using distance learning do not need to modernize or build new buildings in order to provide quality cyber instruction.
I think virtual school is a very cool thing but it won’t work for everybody. Some students have to be in the classroom and being doing hands on things to understand the concepts that are being taught.
http://www.flvs.net/Pages/default.aspx
http://www.wested.org/online_pubs/virtualschools.pdf
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