Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Hippocampus


The first day of the Technology and Distance Learning Symposium went well, despite rain and budget cuts of major proportions. Those who showed up were fired up and ready to latch on to new ideas.

Gary Lopez from Monterey Institute of Technology did a presentation on Hippocampus, a website that hosts free online course content for high school diploma courses. Although the audience was small, the teachers seemed very interested in the possibilities. The courses can be customized, deleting the content that is too high for our students, or not relevant, and it appears that each teacher can create their own customized course. He didn't talk about tracking results, though, so not sure there is a management side to it.

Although some of the content is designed for AP courses, and written at too high a level for our learners, there is an Algebra course with a lot of movies and interactive activities. This would be good staff development for teachers who now have to teach Algebra after being away from it for years. It's just in time, any pace, which are both helpful. I look forward to hearing more about what teachers think of it, and seeing if we can get something going with online high school instruction.

Here are the slides from the presentation:
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