How Do I Know If A School Is Accredited?

Since I worked in a Charter School and I now attend a Distance Education program.  I get the "how do I know if a school is accredited?" question a lot.

Here are few quick tips:

*Approximately 1/5 of degree-granting institutions operating legally in the US are not are accredited.

*Currently there are no authoritative lists of institutions/providers.

*There are two types of accreditation: institutional or programmatic

*The 6 regional commissions and associations:

*Middle States Commission on Higher Education
*New England Association of Colleges and Schools
*Northwest Association of Accredited Schools
*Southern Association of Colleges and Schools
*Western Association of Schools and Colleges
*North Central Association of Colleges and Schools  (the easiest, that is why Phoenix is accredited even though they are physically based in the SW)

*Although there is no national official government agency for accreditation the Council for Higher Education Accreditation is sponsored by the U S Department of Education as the primary national voice for voluntary accreditation and quality assurance.  The United States Distance Learning Association is another organization that gives approval to programs.

*Google your school's name and the keyword accreditation.  If one of these accreditation organizations don't pop up, I would be wary.

*Another litmus test would be, when researching a distance education program, ask them do they offer financial aid.  The US government will not offer financial aid for an unaccredited school. 


UPDATE: The Council for Higher Education Accreditation http://www.chea.org/ has a database that you can look up any school with to see their accreditation status (make sure it matches one of the 6 mentioned above) 


See also: The Database of Accredited Postsecondary Institutions and Programs

Video: Google Forms

Watch this short 2 min video

Google Docs has a Forms feature where you can easily create and publish a web-based/email survey or form, then as participants fill in the form, the responses get aggregated live into one web-based spreadsheet. The implications of this technology are endless for work (surveys, applications, etc.) and education (quizzes, see this digital scantron template one educator created).

Distance Education in the News

I have been noticing a more positive recent shift  of Distance Education perceptions in the mainstream news. See


Washington Post:  
Virtual Revolution Is Brewing for Colleges


New York Times: 
Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom

Video: Did You Know 4.0

Video: Social Media Revolution

Click here for a list of all the stats and sources in the video

Getting Started with Digital Storytelling

Digital Storytelling 101

View more presentations from edvibesproducer.

How to Search, Collect, and Cite Images on the Web

How to Search for Images
EdVibes has started Project CC. Here you will find a list of some of the best directories, search engines, and links for finding safe to use creative commons content (image and audio). One of my new favorite image search engines is Yahoo's Advanced Image Search. Yahoo just knocked off Google Image Search because of their nice "search only creative commons licesend content" feature.  See screenshot below.

Click on image for larger view

Tools to Collect and Organize the Images you find on the web:

Vi.sualize.us (a Delicious for pictures, still a little slow)

Flickr (careful the free limit fills up fast)

How to Responsibly Cite Images you use:

Click on images for larger view