Room for Debate - Can Young Students Learn From Online Classes?

Last week's New York Times Room for Debate - Can Young Students Learn From Online Classes? - had some interesting perspectives on online learning, particularly for middle and high school students. I think one of the perspectives was not based on any experience with online learning, but the rest added to the conversation. As with many such online articles, the discussion is as interesting as the main articles. Maybe they'll do one on "Can young children learn in overcrowded classes?" which I think might be a more relevant topic than this one.

As a parent of a child who completed one semester of 8th grade online through Kaplan, I know there can be challenges with online classes for young students. He suffered through 30 different teachers in 5 weeks for the 6 courses he was in! Imagine starting each week with a new teacher and sitting through a different live presentation about how each class would work every week for 5 weeks. Not a good thing. He also had to deal with auto-graded Spanish tests which ignored all accent marks and incorrectly marked every answer he submitted with the proper accent mark as wrong. When I pointed that error out, I got no response from the principal and as far as I know, every student in the Spanish class was graded incorrectly unless they also complained about the error.

Comments

Blackboard Podcasts

I've been searching for podcasts about Blackboard and have come across a few. Some are too site-specific while others could use a little more polish before I would recommend them to others. However, one podcast I did find to be useful and high quality is Teaching with Blackboard by Jason Rhode at Northern Illinois University. Episode 5, posted last week, discusses how to incorporate RSS feeds into Blackboard using Feed2JS , a website and tool for converting an RSS feed to JavaScript which can be copied and pasted into your Blackboard course. This gives you a relatively easy way to add dynamic content to a course. For many instructors, RSS may be a foreign language, but I think if you listen to the five minute podcast, you will learn enough to get the idea. If you want more, Jason's previous podcast covers RSS and podcasting in more detail.

QuickSource Guides to Blackboard

The Resource Network in Harrisonburg, Virginia, publishes fold out guides to various software applications like MS Office, WordPerfect, Adobe Acrobat and more. They have student and instructor guides to BlackBoard for $4.00 each. Prices are lower if you buy in bulk. I got mine yesterday and they look nice and are easy to read. Each one covers the important things you need to know to use Blackboard as a student or instructor. They are also available through Amazon.com for $4.95 each.

Avoiding lost work in Moodle

When students are working in our installation of Moodle, there are some common ways that their work can be lost. Because Moodle doesn't save what you've written until you click Save (assignments) or Post to Forum in Forums, anything that interrupts your connection to Moodle can lead to lost work and frustration. Interruptions include computer problems or network outages or disconnections. If you are writing anything longer than a paragraph, it's a good idea to use a text editor to do your writing and then copy and paste into Moodle so no matter what happens, you won't lose any of your work. If you combine your use of a text editor with an online backup plan, you'll have a secure backup of all of your work even after the class ends and you can no longer access it (see below). You could use a word processor like Microsoft Word, but you may need to save your work as plain text first to avoid seeing formatting errors when you copy and paste from Word into Moodle. A...

Technology & Instruction for UNEX

Search This Blog