Hi Everyone,

Despite the bad weather around the USA last week we had some very productive meetings in Orlando Florida, including a Summit day on Thursday, February 11, on Connecting Educational Resources for Student Success.

We ended the day with a panel to discuss the day's presentations. The general feeling is that Florida Virtual School (FLVS) is helping to dramatically reinvent how education is delivered. The FLVS model changes (finally) the emphasis of the teacher from "sage on the stage" to "guide on the side." This reallocation of work makes the learning experience more personalized and therefore effective. It also allows a direct focus on helping the student with "how they are learning," i.e. the metacognitive aspect that is so important.

I personally have very strong opinions about where "learning" occurs. Real learning can only occur through application to real life experiences. Anything else is simply development of "tools & frameworks" to help support such experiential learning. Therefore, to me, "school" is all about building tools and frameworks for metacognition.

But, I digress. Our panel discussion moved to the topic of whether the FLVS approach could be used in the classroom and hybrid scenarios? And, Debbie Karcher, CIO of Miami-Dade Public Schools pointed out something that to me was a new realization. This is that until we come up with the systems and processes that allow a classroom (and students) to be managed as individuals - like they are in FLVS - we have a significant blocker.

So, as a good friend of mine once told me, "If there were no challenges there would be no opportunities," I see this as a great opportunity, both for educational leadership and the new technologies to support it . . .

- Rob Abel