NESA Virtual School – Program updates
2009 2008 2007
Fall Update 2009
An Exciting Year of Trial and Transition
By Ken Paynter, NVS Project Manager
The fall 2009 meeting of the NESA Virtual School administrative group, representing 14 of the currently 17 participating schools, took place in Athens at the NESA Fall Leadership Pre-Conference, October 20th and 21st. Our agenda included the requisite "administrivial" but necessary procedural items as well as two main agenda items - to discuss our experiences with school closures this fall due to the H1N1 situation, and to consider whether we might migrate the NVS Project from Blackboard to Moodle.
Regarding H1N1 closure experiences, our group overall had very successful experiences using our NVS platform to sustain ongoing academic instruction online. Most of the schools involved had the working advantage of having the faculty and tech support staff at school, even though the students were home, which allowed for both a very rapid "professional growth" experience, and for a relatively high caliber teaching environment. We tried to share various aspects of these experiences to help each other consider ways to best approach a similar situation "next time".
As regards to a possible transition to Moodle from Blackboard, our efforts have three possible outcomes:
* we are ready to make a transition for the 2010-2011 school year
* we postpone a possible transition until the 2011-2012 school year
* we decide against a transition for now
Our areas of approach to the task of studying a transition are:
1. Credibility - learning from reputable institutions (such as UNC) who did a similar transition
2. Comparing Blackboard to Moodle as thoroughly as possible - from administration to ease of use
3. Studying "interoperability" with Moodle - how well it can be integrated with other school systems, particularly school information systems
4. Finding and pricing ASP services comparable in reliability to Blackboard ASP
5. Developing a healthy transition process which meets our timelines
The NVS schools will continue to rely upon and to use our Blackboard system to our best advantage this year. We are all very pleased with the spirit and unity of our group in forging ahead with this groundbreaking project.
Please direct any questions about the overall strategies and implementations of this project to Kenny Paynter, NESA Virtual School Project Manager,
Spring Update 2008
NESA Virtual School Project Enjoys Sixth Year
The NESA Virtual School Project is completing its sixth year this spring, continuing to provide a platform for both individual school online endeavors and for regional collaborative activity. We are especially pleased with the addition this year of new Learning Objects communication tools - wikis, blogs, and podcasts - which many users are finding make our Blackboard work environment even more flexible and easy to use.
Once again, the NESA Virtual Science Fair has taken excellent advantage of the evolving NVS regional platform, and now includes a special fifth grade edition as well as its regular middle school competition - with total participants comprising over 800 teams! Finally, the NESA Virtual School is serving as the foundation for the World Virtual School Project - already linking NESA with the AISA (Africa) region and ready to include other regions who choose to join this innovative and groundbreaking consortium.
We all are very excited by the positive and progressive changes occurring this year with the NVS Project. Please direct any questions about the overall strategies and implementations of this project to Kenny Paynter, NESA Virtual School Project Manager, at
Winter Update 2007-2008
Wikis, Blogs, Snapshot and a Server-Sharing Merger with the AISA Region
What a spring and summer! The NESA Virtual School (NVS) has gone through some major transformations in the last few months, starting with some preparatory work to assess a merger with the AISA region, Snapshot training in Washington DC at Blackboard headquarters, the actual merger of the AISA and NESA databases, and the implementation of some very powerful new wiki and blog course building tools from a Blackboard partner named Learning Objects. Point by point…
-1. As a stage in the evolution towards a World Virtual School model of regional and trans-regional resource sharing, we have successfully merged the AISA Virtual School database with the NESA Virtual School database on the same server. The major objective was to allow for trans-regional resource sharing and consolidation, while also remaining as discretely and semi-autonomously managed regions – taking best advantage of recently developed “Domain Management” tools incorporated into the Blackboard platform. We are “up and running” with the combined system, and we look forward to the kinds of opportunities this new, globally oriented, online community may enjoy.
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-1. Snapshot is a sophisticated database management tool that is now available to those NVS schools who sent trainees to an intensive workshop conducted at Blackboard headquarters in Washington DC at the end of April. We certainly learned a lot there about database management and about the potential of integration of our various Student Information System (SIS) processes to Blackboard/NVS User and Course management. Developing and implementing this knowledge is certainly now part of our administrative “vocabulary”, and will comprise an important part of our system administrative meetings this fall in Bangkok.
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-1. Thanks to a “heads up” from Gene Witt from the American School in Japan, in the context of the synergistic atmosphere of our World Virtual School meetings at the JOSTI sessions in June,we became aware of a very powerful set of tools (Blackboard Building Blocks) which we could use to greatly amplify the capability of our present system. Thanks to Bea Cameron and the Office of Overseas Schools, we are able to use these tools this year.Already these tools have transformed the NESA Virtual Science Fair implementation structures, and we expect a very warm reception from many NVS teachers who have been asking for Web 2.0 tools to apply to their trade.