NESA Virtual School Project Enjoys Sixth Year

Spring Update 2008 

 
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 nvsproject@gmail.com

  

NESA Virtual School Winter Update '07-'08


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…
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

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