Online Learning

In the last few months I have realized that Online Learning should be an intricate part of teaching. It gives educators an opportunity to prepare students to become 21st Century Learners. With such advancements in technology, it only makes sense to use all the wonderful tools found in the Internet to provide our students with better learning experiences. After further reading The Michigan Merit Curriculum Online Experience Guideline Companion Document, I am overwhelmed with the abundant available resources. It is a matter of finding and fine tuning the ones that will work better in our current teaching environment. The two technologies that truly stand out for me are Web-Quests and Online Simulations.

A Web-Quest is a wonderful tool which can allow a student to discover visuals, support material, and terminology while learning any content. It can be used as an introduction to a subject or reinforcing the learning of a unit. It definitely challenges students to be able to find the information using the Internet. As a pedagogical strategy, web-quests have become inquiry based internet tools which have provided students with a vast amount of information. In my opinion web-quests works better because instead of telling a student go ahead research and find the information, you are providing directed instruction as to where to find the information necessary to accomplish the task. Often times research assignments can turn into hours of meaningless web browsing. I prefer to use web-quest at the end of a unit to reinforce learning.

Another technology which I tremendously benefit from is Online Simulations. The primary goal of Online Simulations is to stimulate active engagement and learning from students and to provide a visual sense of what the student is learning. They also provide teachers with the ability to "recreate real life experiences". It can dramatically improve learning while connecting the students with the real-world. As a Science teacher, I can truly have and advantage when using Online Simulations, specially when conducting animal dissections. In the past I have use Online Simulations to preview an actual dissection, my experience is that it provides students with guidelines and minimizes the amount of questions students can have. I have compared from previous when not using a simulation and I can honestly say that there is a big difference.

Although all the technologies mentioned in the Companion Document can truly benefit students, there is one that I believe would be harder to use with them at my current school and that is Interactive Discussion Between Students. Our current technology status is almost non existent. A high percentage of students do not own a computer at home and rely with the library or computer labs to do any computer work; so if a quick response is needed for a discussion then that is almost impossible. At our school we have two computer labs with approximately thirty computers each. It is extremely hard to get a day to use the labs and many teachers tend to skip teaching with technology. I wish the situation was different for the benefit of our students.