Education Week December 8 Reflection

The main article I read was the "Digital Transformational Key to K-12 Success."  I thought that there was a substantial amount of negativity from this article concerning the difficulties that states would encounter when trying to implement new policies concerning digital education.  The man mentions that “What we put down [in writing] today, in a year, technology can rapidly make obsolete" and he is right to say that it at least makes a roadmap.  I think it's important to get stuff down.  Policy is no different from the technology itself.  In a few years, the stuff you bought/wrote is going to be outdated.  While you can't continually update the technology, since it gets ridiculously expensive, you have to buy something sometime.  Otherwise, you will continually use the excuse that it will be outdated soon and never buy anything.  The same goes with the policies that surround technology.  you can't be paralyzed by the fear of it becoming outdated, otherwise you are never going to get it done and written down.
I was actually really surprised to read about the Florida Virtual school that serves 97,000 students.  That number just blows my mind.  I don't at all agree with the fact that High School should be a completely online experience because there is so much more to a high school education that simply learning all of the facts in math class etc.  There is a great degree of socialization and other skills that you learn while attending a physical high school.  I'm sure that even Barry Jahn would agree with me that it is a terrible idea to do a completely online high school.  Teachers cant be replaced.  I'm sure he completely agrees with the Michigan school districts decision to make sure that every student takes at least one online course to graduate from high school.  That is a great idea.  With the proliferation of technology, I think it is imperative that student's familiarize themselves with taking classes online and be able to function in an online educational setting.  Back to the online high school thought though, how do they fund the online school?  Do they simply appropriate the funds that would have been spent on the students had they gone to a regular public school to the resources needed for the online school?  How does that affect the schools who no longer have those 97,000 students and the money that is given to the schools that those 97,000 students provide?  I'd like to see how those numbers affect those schools and what that does to the money available to those schools and teachers in those districts...