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Because her husband’s military career kept the family on the move, Patti Joubert — the mother of two full-time students at Florida Virtual School (FLVS) — always homeschooled her daughters. Now that they’re in high school, Joubert wanted to find a more resource-enriched alternative.

“[Online schools] offer extra classes that aren’t necessarily in a regular school,” says Joubert, citing supplemental foreign language courses as an example. “The technology they’re getting access to, the course content, the teachers. It’s nice to just sit back and be the parent again.”

Contrary to the assumption that online learning means replacing teachers with computers — or simply saving money by increasing class sizes — Joubert argues that virtual school allows students and teachers to work more closely together. “Students still talk with their teachers; you might even say they talk more. When I was in school, you didn’t have many one-on-one conversations with your teachers. Your teachers spoke to you, they didn’t speak with you. Here, they do oral exams, they talk with the kids, they really get to know each student.”

Q: Do you think your children are receiving a different education at a virtual school than when they were homeschooled?

A: I do, because of the way the courses are presented. Of course, I’m not a teacher; homeschooling parents rarely are, unless they have a bachelor’s or a master’s degree in education. The way they present the lessons at FLVS and the technology and resources they provide are better than I could have offered. Both of my daughters are exceeding my expectations; they’re taking honors courses. I can offer a course, but it certainly wouldn’t be an honors course.

Q: What are the benefits of online learning for your family? Are there any drawbacks?

A: I haven’t found any challenges, really. I’ve just found a lot of great things about it. My husband was in the military, and even after we came to live permanently in Florida, he worked weekends. He only had days off at different times during the week. By having this type of learning, we are able to still have a family life. We have the ability to travel when we want to and choose our time. You can’t do that in traditional schools. Our kids have had the opportunity to go places and see things that other students don’t get to.

Also, for kids that have any type of medical problem, if they lose time out of traditional school because they get sick, they don’t have the opportunity to excel. One of my daughters has juvenile diabetes, but she’s two grades ahead already. With online learning, when you get it, you can move on. When you don’t get it, you can get extra tutoring help and teachers will walk you through it. If you’re sick for a couple of days, you can do your work over the weekend when you feel better. You’re not missing anything.

Of course, it depends on how dedicated a child is to his or her work. My kids are very self-paced because they’ve always been homeschooled, but I think if a child was not so motivated, it would be a bit of a challenge to keep up.

Q: Are your children able to work or socialize with other students at all? Do they feel isolated?

A: In all the courses they’ve taken so far, they’ve had assignments where they pair up with another student and do a project together.  It’s a good experience — they’re learning how to overcome the challenges of working with someone else and to interact with other kids. Just because you don’t “see” someone doesn’t mean you’re not interacting.

There are also plenty of online clubs at FLVS, such as the newspaper club or the science club. And online learning allows my girls more free time to interact outside of school as well, so they’re always volunteering and participating in community activities. Although it’s hard for FLVS teachers and students to get together in person because we’re located all across the state and we’re such a big state, at least once a year, we do a Barnes & Noble Book Fair where students can go to whatever Barnes & Noble is closest to where they live and meet at least some of their teachers.

Q: Could online learning be valuable for other students and families?

A: I have nieces and nephews who go to college and they are offering online courses in college. This is technology that kids will have to learn. Plus, businesses are doing it too: I recently worked for HP as a sales rep, and we were located all across the country, we didn’t have an office. I would go into businesses and train their workers and so forth and the way we had meetings and trainings was online. It’s important to learn how to self-pace and do these kinds of courses; I think it’s as much of a learning experience just taking the course as it is learning what the course teaches.

Flickr: allnightavenue

Florida Virtual School (FLVS) students Christianne and Carylanne Joubert are pretty advanced for their age. Christianne, at 13, is already a published novelist; Carylanne, 14, is about to start 11th grade. The Jouberts would probably succeed at any school they attended, but they attribute a large part of their progress to online learning. (And for Carlyanne, who has diabetes, the convenience of doing school work at home is a big advantage.)

The Jouberts, whose father is in the military, requiring the family to travel a great deal, were homeschooled by their mother until recently.

“Online classes are easy to understand. You can move onto the next thing much faster,” Christianne says. “I have a friend in regular public school who says that they like FLVS courses better because they don’t have to wait around for the other students to get it — or get frustrated when they don’t get it themselves. But it’s not easier because it’s of a lower quality. The better quality makes it easier.”

I chatted with both girls and got a good glimpse into their academic life is like — flexible, varied, and personalized. It’s not the best fit for every kid, of course, but for these students, it works.

Q: Is going to school at FLVS different from being homeschooled?

A: Carylanne: The assignments are different. The courses I took when my mom was teaching me were mostly reading the lessons, getting the information, doing worksheets and exams and that kind of stuff. At FLVS, I write essays, I do PowerPoint presentations and brochures. In my Latin course, I had to pretend I lived in 100 B.C. and write up an invitation and a menu. There are different assignments for those who are more creative. The lessons also show the information in different ways; sometimes there’s a visual representation, like a diagram or a video, to help remember it.

Q: What is your typical day like at virtual school?

A: Carylanne: Most days, I’ll get up and do my chores around the house and then once I get onto the computer I can just start my lessons, read through the lesson and do the assignment. For me, it’s easy. I read through the information and then I can move on to the next assignment. I don’t have to wait. I can go ahead and do more, so I get done with the course faster. I get to learn more instead of being bored.

Christianne: I can start at 10 a.m. and end at 4 p.m. and have an entire week’s worth of work done. Since I can move faster through school, I have time to explore my passion for writing.

Q: Do you interact much with your teachers?

A: Carylanne: I can call my teacher, or text her, or go into a special chatroom. I talk with my teachers at least twice a month because I do oral exams and monthly calls. I don’t usually have to call them because I haven’t needed much help, but they are always there when I need them. They’ve always responded to me within 24 hours.

Christianne: I email my teachers every day. They’re very personable. I just finished my English course and my teacher said, ‘If you need anything, you can call me,’ even though I’m not her student anymore. If you have an issue, if you’re not quite getting something, you can email or text your teacher; there are also help buttons on every page if you need extra help on assignments. I get a call from one of my teachers at least once a week asking if I’m doing okay, if I need help. I think you get a better way to talk to teachers [in virtual school]. You get that one-on-one.

Q: What’s the best part about virtual school for you?

A: Carylanne: First, of course, I get to travel at whatever pace I want to. If I’m having a bad week, or a bad day with my diabetes, it doesn’t matter. I have Monday through Sunday to do my work. The flexibility makes it a lot easier. I just signed up for my first eleventh-grade courses. When I started with the virtual school, it was the summer I turned twelve. I had had a computer for gaming purposes, but I had never really been going on the Internet. [Through FLVS], I learned all different kinds of programs like PowerPoint and Microsoft Publisher and Glogster, a software that helps you create special posters. It gave me a way to learn how to use the different tools so that someday I can use all these things in the workplace.

Q: Do you interact much with other students?

A: Carylanne: There are at least one or two collaboration assignments per course. I found my chemistry course was the easiest one because I was able to find a partner who was willing to work. We use a special chatroom through FLVS. Once, I had a partner who was supposed to meet me in the chatroom at a certain time and they didn’t show up, so it was a little bit harder to work with them. Something we’re asked a lot is about the lack of socialization being homeschooled or going to virtual school. But I’ve found that many public school kids seem like they’re more shy and have a harder time talking to adults! And with more time on our hands, it’s easier to do other activities like volunteering or Girl Scouts or other clubs.

Christianne: I’m in the newspaper club at FLVS. I’m able to have my voice heard and get across what I think is important. We have online meetings every Tuesday through Eluminate Live. We log on and we’re in a virtual classroom. We can put things up on a whiteboard like slide shows, presentations, and PowerPoints, and then we have these breakout sessions where we can all work together on things. We send all the articles to each other using Google Docs. It’s just like every other school newspaper, we’re just online.

Q: Would you recommend virtual school to other students?

A: Carylanne: I’ve always been homeschooled, so I don’t know how public school is, but I like to work at my own pace, just sit in my bedroom and do my homework with no distractions. I’ve also read statistics that students do better when they are in virtual school — the grade percentages are higher. Sure, the classrooms are bigger online, but that’s helpful when you have to do a collaborative assignment because students could be anywhere in the course. If it does save money [for schools to have online course options], that’s good, so you could put more money into the education system. Teachers are still employed, just in a different way.

Christianne: Whenever I meet another kid my age, I always recommend it as another way to do school. Especially for kids who don’t have an easy time with homework or with school. I know one kid in my class from England who said it was easier for him than his public school. Plus, I have more time to write; I was able to write a novel because I had enough time. We went through a self publishing company called Xlibris. It’s very exciting. I’m working on my second book now. It’s already a planned series of four. And after that, I plan on writing another one based on Celtic mythology. I love writing… it’s a way to express myself.

Flickr:HygieneMatters

Learning Poetry through Bob Dylan and the Beatles

By Sara Bernard

Students, schools, and homeschooling parents are on a perpetual hunt for high-quality, vetted, free (or cheap) educational materials.

Shmoop, a growing collection of study guides and teacher resources on everything from SAT prep to the Civil War, is attempting to fill that need. It’s mostly free of charge, with some nominal fees for test prep and a few other features.

“We’re horrified at how much money is often charged to schools for this kind of thing. We try to make it inexpensive,” said Ellen Siminoff, Shmoop’s president and CEO. And last year, she says, Shmoop offered their test-prep materials for free to ten disadvantaged school districts.

Shmoop isn’t crowdsourced — the company and its authors own the content; it’s not edited by its user community — but the site is still going through a beta phase, with all the requests and recommendations from users. Shmoop is funded primarily through advertising and small licensing fees, and all of the content is produced by PhDs, K-12 teachers, and other subject-area experts.

“The requirement is that it has to be great content and authors have to know the material,” says Siminoff, “but it has to be funny and interesting, too. You can’t just know Ulysses, you have to like Ulysses.”

I asked Siminoff a few questions about the Silicon Valley-based company and how it works. Shmoop’s mantra: If content producers love their subjects, students and teachers will, too.

Q: Why Shmoop? How did it start?

My husband and I were looking at educational resources online for our own kids. We became quite angry at what was on the Web. It was reductive, it talked down to kids. So much was about how to cheat. We wanted to build something that encouraged students to learn. Anyone who loves any subject loves it because their favorite teachers taught it to them — often, those were teachers who loved their subjects, too. We wanted to do that.

The site has been up for a little over two years, although we thought about it a lot before we put it up. We started out by building content related to literature. We wrote everything in a very colloquial tone. Students liked the approach and teachers liked it too, but it was librarians, actually, who were the first to use us.

Q. Who uses Shmoop now?

Mostly students, teachers, and parents. We have a big homeschool parent audience. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to teach a young child, but you often notice that you’ve forgotten what you used to know! We have a whole teacher area with teacher resources, too, that help make teaching the Civil War, civics, Hamlet, and so on, interactive and fun using the Web. We’ve put up some test prep areas, for SAT, AP, and ACT. We now have multiple million users per month. We’ve licensed a lot of material to entire school districts, such as Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

Q: What kind of content does Shmoop have? How is it growing?

I don’t sleep at night because of all the stuff we have to do! We started out with literature and then we expanded into poetry. I hated poetry until I read Shmoop poetry. I realized I didn’t understand poetry — that was my problem. One of the most fun sections for us was all the stuff we did related to music. One of the things we were talking about was who our favorite poets were, and Bob Dylan came up as one of our favorite poets. So we “Shmooped” All Along the Watchtower. We’ve since done Bruce Springsteen, Eminem, Kanye West, the Beatles. A lot of teachers say, “What a great way to open a poetry unit, to talk about music!”

We’re now expanding into math and science, too. We have Pre-Algebra and are going to put up AP Calculus in a month or so, and are working on a lot more in math and science. It’s feedback that drives us; everyone sends us notes and tells us what we’re missing. That’s why I put “beta” on the site — I never feel we’re done. What’s great about this platform is you never have to wait until the next publishing cycle to add something.

Q: Why do online materials like Shmoop work?

It’s our real belief that learning doesn’t have to be linear. [On Shmoop], you can bounce around, you don’t have to read something straight through. We guide you a little, but part of it is getting great epiphanies about something you didn’t know about. You can be reading Huck Finn and get curious about the Civil War; you can be reading a piece of poetry and wonder who Emily Dickinson really was. That’s the beauty of the Web. And even if we don’t have it on Shmoop, we link to it. We have a “Best of the Web” area, a whole photo area, and link to audio and video and a bunch of other things.