Resources for Virtual School Administrators

Virtual schools can be designed for younger children and students who must be homebound for health reasons, for working adults who want to further their education and as components of schools that offer both online courses and traditional classroom instruction. Administrators, including principals, vice principals, academic officers, provosts, department heads, deans and chairpersons are active components of virtual schools and sometimes have twice their work cut out for them.



Several resources are available for virtual school administrators to be sure they are communicating with instructors and staff, managing budgets and salaries, overseeing aspects of student curriculum and maintaining technology and interfaces, even in an online setting.
  1. Federal and State Resources

    • The United States Department of Education has a National Education Technology Plan useful to administrators at virtual schools. The plan includes a task force for developing and implementing methodologies to examine quality and accreditation standards for virtual schooling to ensure it is equal to that of traditional schooling. The department has resources for ensuring broadband access, teacher training for online classrooms, training for technology decision making and creative technology partnerships. The plan allows administrators to gain insight on planning and implementing technology budget management, including tools to determine total technology costs and spending, budget restructuring and refresh cycles. Additionally, each state's department of education has a department and list of resources to aid virtual school administrators.

    North American Council for Online Learning

    • The North American Council for Online Learning is an informational resource for all virtual school administrators in kindergarten through high school (K-12) schools. The council has a database of news articles, research and information about initiatives specific to Internet instruction and participation. It divides the content into skill groups like information, media and technology skills; learning and innovation skills; and life and career skills.

    The Consortium for School Networking

    • The Consortium for School Networking is a professional association for school district technology leaders with the slogan "advancing K-12 technology leadership." They have an annual conference and have programs for "the 21st Century Superintendent," essential skills for virtual education, budgeting, cyber security, green computing, data-driven decision making, open technologies, IT crisis preparedness, student tech support, emerging technology, participatory learning and one-to-one computing.

    Discovery Education

    • Discovery Education is a media company and interactive online community that focuses on products and solutions for virtual school administrators. This includes an assessment zone, professional development tools, benchmarks for all U.S. states and the Vanderbilt Assessment of Leadership in Education (VAL-ED) program that gauges the virtual performance of principals and other ranking administrators.

    Common Sense Media

    • Common Sense Media publishes the CyberSmart guide to virtual school administration with a focus on literacy and citizenship. The guide is interactive and includes video and lesson plans on topics like digital citizenship, twenty-first century challenges, research and information fluency and authentic learning and creativity.

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