OnSchooler Video #1
It's here! The launch of our new vlog: we have over 70 short videos planed to show you what we do, how we do it and why you want to use the OnSchooler system in your school.
Whether you're working with one student or a whole school district, this is the insider info that shows you how to actually use all those "best practices" in education in a logical, coherent, effective way to produce the desired results.
What are the results? Watch the video to see...
Or, if you prefer reading, here's the transcript:
Hi, I'm Cynthia Fischer, founder of OnSchooler and creator of a system of education that actually produces the desired results. If you are as passionate about education as I am let's join forces and totally transform your school.
This is video number one for OnSchooler: this will give you a bird's eye view of what we do and how we do it.
What we have is an E-Learning platform, and a curriculum, and a whole philosophy and method of education that were all conceived at the same time. When you use the platform, the curriculum and the whole methodology altogether, these are the kinds of results that you're going to get.
Let's talk about the type of results you will get.
BENEFIT #1:
First of all, all of your students will read younger and more easily.
What exactly does that mean? Well, in a typical school system, only about 30 to 40% of third graders are reading at the third grade level. I'm probably not the first person to tell you that if those are the results you're getting, your system just isn't working....
Here's what you get with on OnSchooler: 90% of your students will be reading at the third grade level by the end of first grade.
That's a pretty big difference. If you never did anything else with our system, if you never used the rest of the program at all, and all you did in your whole school system was change it so that 90% of your students are reading at the third grade level by the end of first grade, I want you to think about how different all of your other results would be.
BENEFIT #2:
Here's the second result: Non-English-speaking students fully understand every subject from day one.
About 10% of the students in the US don't speak English as their first language. It's kind of a problem, but we're actually going to turn it into an asset for your school district.
Now, if you've ever lived in another country where they spoke another language, you probably know that even though you studied that language for a long time and you've learned hundreds or a thousand words, you're still missing a lot of what's happening. The speed at which people are speaking in real life is a lot faster than in your high school Spanish class, for example...the idioms that people use in different places, and the slang and the cultural references...you're not going to understand everything that's happening.
And so when students come here to the US, and they don't speak English fluently, they're missing about two to three years of their practical education before they understand enough English to really understand everything that's happening.
That's a terrible idea. It's not working.
So what we do with our system is this: on our platform, all of our lessons can be available in multiple languages.
So you do your lesson in just English, if you only want to learn English (I don't recommend that because that's a waste of your brain) but you can do it in just English, or you can do it in English and Spanish, or English and French, or English and Russian, or English and Korean. Whatever your language is that you use as your primary language, you do that one for the first language of the lesson, and the language that you want to learn you do for the secondary language.
Once you become more fluent you can switch it around so that you're doing your lessons primarily in the language that you're trying to learn, and then you have your own native language as your backup language to help you fully understand everything that's happening.
For example, our curriculum is pretty intense! We're teaching some pretty advanced science concepts, for example, from a fairly young age, and if you don't speak English fluently, you will not understand what's happening.
With our system, with OnSchooler, you can fully understand everything in every subject from day one. This means that your English as a second language students are not missing out and falling behind in school by three years.
BENEFIT #2B:
Secondly, and I know this isn't the top priority on your mind right now (because right now only 30 to 40% of your kids are even reading English very well at the third grade level), but once you switch over to our system and you start having so much success you'll realize that, actually, learning a second language has been a hallmark of a quality education for thousands of years. For your students to be able to learn two languages at the same time, with no additional effort on your part, just because all of the lessons are available in multiple languages, is a really great benefit for you.
BENEFIT #3:
The third great benefit of our system for you is that we have one platform that works for every subject in every setting.
I'm not sure if you've noticed this, but consumers are becoming a little bit more picky and that includes in their school choices. If you have one platform that works for every subject in every setting, then you could really standardize your system of education all across your entire school district (or however large your area). Whether you have students in public schools, charter schools, private schools, home schools, focus schools, technical schools, at any type of school setting, you can use the same platform everywhere.
The platform is so easy to use, we have kindergarten students using it; by the end of the first hour, they can do it completely on their own. But it's also powerful enough to use for adult training, workplace training, just everyday training or complete workplace retraining for a whole new career. It's simple, but it's powerful. You can use it for anything; use it for every subject. Right now you probably have a hodgepodge of different educational systems that you're using. Some of them are really fantastic. There's some really great stuff out there. But, you're setting up a lot of different accounts, you're setting up a lot of different software. Sometimes you have to install different apps or things, and that can become really a problem.
With our system, you don't install anything, you just use it online. You can use it on any computer, laptop, tablet, smartphone, really any web connected device at all. So everybody can use it right away, it's nice and simple.
Two more things that you really need to know about the results with our system:
BENEFIT #4:
One is that most of our students complete their typical high school level education by age 14. (By high school level education, I mean a US high school level education.)
What this means is that we're doing a much more accelerated curriculum partly because all of our students are reading much earlier, so we get a huge headstart there, but also our curriculum is a little bit more accelerated and it's also super advanced. It's very in depth, it's very detailed, and we require all of our students get A's on everything all the time.
That might sound impossible, but with our system, your students will finish their typical high school level material by age 14, this gives them a chance to complete high school level material that's high school level material on an international level, so what we would call junior college basically. Approximately the first two years of your college credits, you can start working on those while you're still in high school, in one of our eight paths or one of our technical programs. This means that by the time that you've gotten out of high school, the typical student has already got one to two years of college credits under their belt, or a complete certificate program, so they can begin a vocational career immediately.
BENEFIT #5:
All right, here's the last thing: Our program is half online, half hands on.
(Not for the youngest kids, not the Foundations level students where everything is all hands-on, but the rest of the program is half on-line, half hands-on.)
What this means is: since approximately second grade, your students have been learning how to apply what they've been learning. If this sounds a little bit familiar and you've heard of this with the Common Core, it's true: they thought that was a great idea.
It is a great idea! We started using this in 1999 in our first lab school because the things that you learn, you need to immediately apply. Not only does it employ another type of learning style that a lot of students really enjoy, so you're not just reading it, you're not just hearing it, you're not just answering questions about it, you're actually using it, but that's real life. In practical life, and the whole point of school, is that students are able to use their knowledge and skills.
Hands-on application is half of our curriculum. It's literally 50%. So you do a lesson on the computer, you immediately use it hands on. And all of these things, whether it's a lesson on the computer or a hands on lesson are designed to work together to meet all of the objectives. So it's not a mystery why we're doing each assignment: it's not busy work, it's not coloring, it's not crossword puzzles, those make me crazy; we really are focused on getting things done. And you really need to apply your time very well if you're going to use our accelerated curriculum.
The hands-on half of each lesson requires creativity, problem solving, research, experimentation and multi-subject integrations. This is where OnSchooler takes school to the next level! The computer lessons replace lectures, textbooks, worksheets and quizzes and make them all more efficient. Then the classroom teacher takes it from there and uses our provided lesson plans or custom plans to really bring the new knowledge and skills to life.
SUBSCRIBE TO GET THE NEXT 70 VIDEOS:
I want to talk for just a second about what you'll see in our other videos, and why you'll want to follow us. (Make sure you subscribe by email because if you just follow us on social media, you won't probably catch all the posts.)
We'll go over some videos like this: this is our Main channel, this is the main information. And then we'll talk about our Curriculum and our Philosophy in two other separate channels. And then we'll talk about some of the whole challenges for the Who, Where and When of how to use our system, because we're basically giving you one system that can be used for anybody, anywhere, anytime, and it'll give you a lot more flexibility to bring in people that have sort of drifted out of your school system, and get everybody on the same rhythm, the same flow, going to the same place, even if they're doing it somewhere else, or some other time, or some slightly different way, it's really going to bring everybody together overall.
And then we'll talk specifically just about our bilingual program -- Multilingual program, really -- and how you can benefit from that as well as our OnSchooler Team. We're actually building a team of Curriculum Writers that want to help develop more material for our system.
And finally we'll have three other channels: One for Teachers and Teaching. One for OnSchooler at Home. (We have a lot of people that use this either as their full curriculum for homeschool or as supplemental until their school district really gets with the system. You can use this just to learn a specific thing like fractions, or the multiplication tables or you can use it as a full supplement for every subject.) And then we'll have a channel for OnSchooler Insider. That's where we'll show you to the behind the scenes things that you want to know.
We're running a startup here -- sort of a reboot of a startup since we've been doing this for a long time -- but this, OnSchooler, is our new launch of all of the latest and greatest that we've put together into one big package that you can use at your school. Scale it up for a million people, or just down to one student. It's good for everybody.
Thanks for watching and be sure to subscribe to our email list at the bottom of our homepage or in the pop-up window. Thanks!
(see #onschoolerathome for pictures submitted by home school families)
