Hudson High School is an experiment in the future. The school opened in New York City this fall with the goal of combining online courses and face-to-face instruction in a method known as blended learning. Unlike some other districts who are experimenting with digital education, the Hudson High program is not a desperate cost saving measure. It’s an attempt to revamp a 300 year old educational system with all of the new opportunities that new technology has to offer.
“My hope is that we’re going to change the way education looks in this little place, in this little school,” Principal Nancy Amling, who created the school with the city’s Education Department told AolNews, “and that ultimately we will impact all of New York City.”
Computers aren’t replacing teachers here, they’re making it possible for teachers to work more one on one, and for kids to move at their own pace and learn in a style that suits them best – through text, videos or hands-on labs, just to name a few. Each student at Hudson has a laptop. They take a face-to-face class and an online class for each subject. Every teacher has a website that makes their semester plan, their archive or lessons and the students grades available to parents and students. The textbooks are all online too, leading to less cluttered classrooms.
“Our online classes are a really good reinforcement of what we learn in face-to-face class,” said Racheal Rydell-Klages, a 14-year-old freshman. “I think it’s really good at preparing us for the future, because this is the age of technology.”
Racheal and her classmates may be “digital natives” – kids who have never known a world without the constant availability of digital information, but, as Amling points out, many of them did not enter Hudson as good digital learners.
“The first few weeks kids were saying, ‘I just want the teacher to stand in the front of the room and tell me what I need to know,’ ” Amling recalled to the New York Times. “They’re coming into ninth grade; they’ve spent the eight years in the school system pretty much in that model.”
In fact, learning how to find and absorb digital information may be one of the most important skills that Hudson has to offer these kids. Far too many teens who are connected at the hip to their iPhones and their Facebook accounts but don’t have basic digital survival skills when it comes down to finding and processing data they need for school, and that they’ll need eventually in their professional lives.
We can’t wait to see how Hudson High School’s evolves!
