Giant Campus Blog

A recent article / report published by WebMD has found a simple half-hour delay in high school start time led to a significant improvement in students’ mood, alertness, and motivation, and increased their average sleep time during the week, according to a new study.

Judith A. Owens, MD, MPH, at the Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence, R.I., and colleagues studied 201 students in grades nine through 12 attending a Rhode Island high school where the class start time was changed from 8 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. for a two-month period. Students completed online surveys before the change in class time and then after.

Owens and her team found that:

* The percentage of students getting less than seven hours of sleep per night dropped by 79.4%.
* Students reporting at least eight hours of sleep per night increased from 16.4% at the start of the study to 54.7% after two months.
* The percentage of students who reported feeling at least somewhat unhappy or depressed dropped from 65.8% to 45.1%.
* The percentage of students who reported feeling annoyed or irritated throughout the day also dropped, from 84% to 62.6%.
* Reports of visiting a health center for fatigue-related symptoms decreased from 15.3% to 4.6%.
* Sleep duration increased on school nights by about 45 minutes and the average bedtime on school nights was 18 minutes earlier.

The findings are published in the July issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

Online schooling provides the flexibility of school study times – when teens are most alert and happy!

Interesting article in USA Today about a growing trend of high school seniors, growing restless and unsatisfied by the current offerings in their school, choose to reinvent it on their own or skip out on parts of it. 

A selection from Greg Toppo’s article: “Trimble is part of a small but growing group of students — most of them academically advance and, as a result, a tad restless — who are tinkering with their senior year.  A few observers say the quiet experiment has the potential to reinvent high school altogether.” 

These stories get me going every morning.  Helping students and schools reinvent high school education is what we do at Giant Campus every day.  Make high school more relevant for our students and get them prepared for the future.  Our motto says it all:  Real Classes for the Real World!

Here’s a link to the full article at USA Today:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-02-25-senioryear25foronline_st_N.htm

I just read a great article in Forbes on the effectiveness of online learning and use of technology curriculum in the classroom.  Features nice highlights of our industry friends K12 Inc. and Apex Learning.

My favorite exerp from the article: “The “guide on the side” model takes off a lot of the pressure on teachers in terms of lesson plan design and content delivery. If they act as classroom supervisors rather than domain experts, allowing technology to play the latter role, the likelihood of children learning better even from teachers who do not have the appropriate background is considerably higher.

Maybe President Obama needs to mandate the use of a certified online curriculum for all public schools to give America’s K-12 kids a chance to become competitive in the 21st century!

Great article by Sramana Mitra over at Forbes!  Here’s a link to the full article:  http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/14/online-education-innovation-intelligent-technology-mitra.html

Learn all about Giant Campus of Washington and meet the people behind our school!

High-tech electives go online for teens
Washington state high-school students can now opt out of certain traditional elective classes at their school, instead taking a limited number of online courses in game design, 3-D animation and video production.

Washington state high-school students can now opt out of certain traditional elective classes at their schools, instead taking a limited number of online courses in game design, 3-D animation, video production and other technology subjects.

The for-credit classes, free to most students, supplement normal core courses, allowing students to stay enrolled in their high schools while taking some elective classes their schools do not offer.

It’s all possible through a new partnership, announced earlier this month, between the White Salmon Valley School District and Giant Campus, a national online technology-education company.

“It’s an avenue for students to pursue to take courses that normally they wouldn’t be able to,” White Salmon Valley Superintendent Jerry Lewis said.

Read more of our article here: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2010828980_giantcampus19m.html

Thanks Brian Rosenthal for the great write-up!