Christopher Hamady, technology coordinator for the Regina Coeli School, is looking for help with an interesting project:

Our Spanish teacher would like to find a school in a native Spanish-speaking country that would like to do web-based video correspondence with our students. The format would entail that each school would make QuickTime videos of their students asking simple questions about the culture of the other, and the other school would reply using the same medium. The videos would be uploaded to the Web so that each school could easily access them.
Each group of students would have the opportunity to ask and answer questions in both English and Spanish, thus aiding development skills in speaking and translating of both languages. The participating school would have to have access to a web server to post their videos. The rest of the details could be discussed via email.

This is a great idea, and is quite doable with very inexpensive tools today.
Email reginacoeli_spanish@nwoca.org [from macintouch]

John Gartner writes in Wired that Cyber Schools are not measuring up…

Cyber schools — where students complete all coursework online using home computers — are a big hit with parents, who are signing up their children as quickly as the virtual doors open. However, test results for 2003 show students at many cyber schools are not measuring up to state standards or to their peers who attend brick-and-mortar schools.
According to the non-profit Center for Education Reform, or CER, the number of online public schools has grown from 30 to 82 during the past two years, offering instruction in 19 states. That number could more than double in 2004, as school districts in Ohio have granted charters to 63 cyber schools, up from seven in 2003.

I don’t know much about these initiatives, but one year’s worth of data does not mean a whole lot….