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Ohio’s new Credit Flexibility law opens wide the doors to gain credit by working in the community.

For example, we run a small toy/doll museum. It needs interpretation, audio tours, perhaps video, marketing, a museum store set up, and more. The traffic now is quite low, but could be enhanced with programs and media. The right student could work miracles.

Under CreditFlex, we just need a willing teacher and an enthusiastic student. Once they created a plan with valid learning goals (business, media, writing, …) the student could build something they would really look back on as a highlight of their high school years.

Yet such plans need much more support. Teachers need building blocks to assemble credit-unit plans. Students and parents need to understand what’s possible. The community needs to know the program exists, and needs ways to reach out to students.

To help people contact each other, I run Ohio Credit Flexibility on Facebook. It’s a place to at least talk about the opportunities.

What I’d really like to be involved in is leading development of a more custom web app.

There, users could document, categorize, and assemble lessons from credit-flex options successfully completed. Teachers could see how other teachers have fit similar work into credit units. Students could relate their lessons learned. And community members could announce future partnership opportunities.

“So, do we go back to the drawing board? For fiscal responsibility, yes. For improving our schools, we need more.

“As has been voiced here so often, blended learning can help in so many areas. So to Governor Kasich this week I’d say: while you are “taking some time” to “reflect on what happened here,” have someone give me a call.

“Ohio has in its education pocket an ace no other state has—Credit Flexibilty. We quietly launched it in 2010, but since then have largely left it up to a few students and their parents. More

For instance, Norm Augustine today bemoans the lack of teaching history in our schools. Yet one commenter points out that “teachers can’t teach what they don’t know”

It’s not just history teachers! Those charged with educating students at any level need more familiarity with the basics of cultural literacy. Math, science, economics, even music are far more interesting when taught by a broadly educated person.

What was alchemy? Solomon’s baby? Fishers of Men? Who “crossed the Rubicon” and what is the current meaning? What is Archimedes’ bath? The significance of Runnymede? What is The Thinker? In music, the Ninth?

Students at the youngest of ages need to hear the speech of literate and learned adults. Yet this is not at all what we ask of those passing through our schools of education. Nor is it considered as part of professional development.

Deborah Meyers often says that students have a right to come in contact with “interesting people”. Well, a rodeo clown-mime may be “interesting”, but silence does not breed in a child good language and thinking. My teacher friends know and speak much of football and American Idol. Sometimes less so of the basics that once denoted a moderately learned person.

When we invest in tech, then, let us think beyond drilling students in math, though that has its benefits.

Saw yesterday that a young man at East Knox High (Mt. Vernon) is using the Bones in Motion app on his phone to complete his Phys Ed Requirement.