Clark: ‘We are excited to begin using itslearning to improve our abilities to extend our students’ learning opportunities within Forsyth County Schools.’

How has online learning developed in Forsyth County Schools?

Forsyth County Schools has been using a learn management system for all of our students in degree K-12 as an extra mode of instruction since 2007. The manipulation of an LMS enabled us to blend face-to-face and on-line learn opportunities, and finally it provided the means for us to implement our own virtual school within the district. Our LMS grew to house the on-line learn communities for the teachers in our schools to collaborate and communicate about teaching and as a platform for sharing resources .

What challenges did Forsyth County Schools face in terms of IT infrastructure before choosing itslearning?

We had an increasing demand for our LMS to extend beyond entirely delivering teaching into a social and collaborative space – a eruditeness community. We besides had another challenge – disconnected silo of data regarding scholar information and performance that did not communicate efficaciously with each other and were unable to provide teachers with fair in meter information to assist student learning. Forsyth County Schools has besides been an external drawing card in the area of Bring Your own Technology ( BYOT ), besides referred to as Bring Your own Device ( BYOD ), and our LMS was unable to work across a variety of device platforms. ultimately, to support our BYOT first step, we have begun using a suite of web-based tools to facilitate digital long time learning. many of these tools were requiring the users to log in from multiple screens on school-technology and hand-held devices .

How do you think itslearning will address these challenges?

I think that itslearning will provide us with the necessary family for the different learning communities that exist within the school arrangement. not lone will it provide blended learning opportunities and a platform for our virtual school, it will besides enable our teachers to parcel resources and develop on-line courses seamlessly. Itslearning is device agnostic, meaning that our students will be able to access their on-line classroom on district-provided technology resources but besides on their own personal devices from home or at school. This handiness will enable teachers to transform the memorize process in their classrooms by “ flipping ” instruction and focusing on student-created collaborative projects. finally, we think that itslearning will enable us to provide a personalized learning plan for each scholar so that teachers will be able to recommend assignments based on a scholar ’ second specific learning needs, interests, and abilities.

You see itslearning as a helpful tool in your BYOD initiative. Can you elaborate about this?

The goal of our BYOT enterprise is to empower students and teachers with the personal technology tools to transform education. We want to move from traditional teacher-directed mannequin to one that is student-centered. We do not want teachers to focus on technology ; rather, we want them to portray students with the learn standards and challenge them to research those topics and explore new ways to show what they have learned with their own devices. The function of the teacher has to shift in this type of learning environment, as they learn aboard students to discover new subject, applications, and strategies. Since itslearning is device agnostic, the teacher can facilitate instruction more effectively by communicating with students, creating communities to collaborate on projects, designing discussion forums and blogs for sharing student exercise, and assessing completed projects with polls and rubrics.

itslearning will be launched fall 2013. How do you think it will be received by teachers and students?

We reviewed and vetted many on-line learning systems before selecting itslearning, and it is the learning platform that meets the needs of the administrators, teachers, and students within our district. I think that teachers will be grateful for how easy it is to plan education within itslearning. There are so many possibilities to grow within the platform, yet it isn ’ t overpower. Our teachers have been presently identifying learning objects aligned to standards, to prepare for our migration to itslearning. Uploading fresh capacity and lessons and rearranging the tempo of instructional activities is a simple “ haul and drop ” process within the chopine. The students and parents will benefit from the organizational structure of itslearning and maintaining all of their materials in one localization. Itslearning is therefore easy to navigate that I think our users will be surprised compared to their experiences within our past LMS. We are excited to begin using itslearning to improve our abilities to extend our students ’ learning opportunities within Forsyth County Schools .

About Forsyth County Schools

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