March 2009

Why the DLC? One Woman, Two Schools, No Teachers

Evie Wonderly, Secretary, Cape Flattery School District

Evie Wonderly. Even her name sounds heroic. Take a determined secretary from a very small district… two high schools with limited teachers to teach elective and required courses… add the Digital Learning Commons (DLC)… and you’ve got the plot of a great technology success story.

When Cape Flattery School District joined the DLC in 2007, it was interested in solving one sticky problem: providing students with online alternatives for courses that Clallam Bay and Neah Bay Schools were not equipped to offer. Wonderly, who was working part-time in the district office, took on the role of overseeing the district’s DLC membership, acting as a liaison between teachers, students, and the DLC. “I have an elementary teaching license,” she says, “so getting back in the classroom to assist teachers and students with the DLC was a natural fit for me.”

Making history with online courses

In that first membership year, Wonderly’s primary focus was online classes. She began to address the needs of her students and her over-extended teachers with online elective courses. This year, though, things stepped up a notch or two. Wonderly is using an online course, Pacific Rim History, to fulfill a history graduation requirement for a third of the population of Clallam Bay High School.

“Twenty-five of our 36 high school students are taking online courses and half of those are fulfilling their Washington State History requirement,” says Wonderly. “We have three full-time and two half-time teachers at Clallam Bay High School. There just aren’t enough hours in the day for the two history/English teachers to slip in a Washington State History class. So we decided to give this a try, a “hybrid” online class.”

Students are registered for the online class but there is one actual class period at Clallam where they work together. An on-site monitor helps them understand their assignments and emails questions back and forth to the instructor of the online class. “Internet Academy has been fantastic. They let us have students work together on projects and they give us any information that we need to clarify assignments,” says Wonderly. She augments online sessions with experiential learning to pull in the students and engage them in things beyond their computers. In-class visitors from the Makah Cultural and Research Center talked about some of their native traditions and resources; a truly “hands-on” session centered on the art of Washington State cooking.

All levels of learners in one room

Over at Neah Bay, another 20 students are taking online courses through the DLC. Some of them are also fulfilling a graduation requirement. “They have an interesting thing going for their Spanish program,” Wonderly explains, “They have one class period but students at many levels, so they use online classes with one in-school instructor. Students receive the content that they need at their level without the instructor trying to teach two or three different levels at the same time.”

Her most impressive success story involves a student who will graduate this year because he made up one year of course work with online classes. She adds, “Last year, he was classified as a sophomore, but he took online courses beyond his regular workload and he’s scheduled to graduate on time.”

Teambuilding works

Wonderly credits some of the success in the Cape Flattery School District to the DLC’s School Support team: “The support I get from the DLC is amazing… I’m always emailing questions; we’ve had people come out and do trainings with us. And it kind of works the same way with the students. The more support we can give them, the more success they have with the online classes. We call the DLC for support and the students call us for support, and if you keep that chain going, that’s what makes the program successful.”

We couldn’t think of a happier ending.

Want to read more? Browse the Success Stories page.