Distance Education and Virtual Schools

1. Identify and briefly discuss at least 5 pros and 5 cons of having virtual schools.
5 Pros
-Allows students to move at his or her own pace.
- Can be an alternative to dropping out for some students if they have other responsibilities.
- Helps parents to be very involved with their child’s learning.
-Is much easier for students with physical disabilities to learn as opposed to the obstacles of a “regular” school.
-Flexible schedule (students can take breaks when they need to and work when they are at their creative peak.

5 Cons
-Lack face-to-face interaction with a teacher.
-Students may not get involved with other activities.
-Lack of social interaction can be a problem later in life.
-It may be very easy for students to procrastinate and slack off if there are no definite due dates.
-Parents may not have enough knowledge to help their children with homework.

2. Discuss some of the key skills teachers need to have to be successful when teaching a virtual school.
Teachers who teach in a virtual school need to be just as qualified as any other teacher. However, it is important that they are available at all times (within reason) to assist students with their coursework. They need to be prompt in getting back to their students’ questions. These teachers should also be very articulate so that they are able to offer explanations in an online environment without physically pointing to something or showing something on an overhead. They naturally need to be adept with technology as well.
3. Discuss your findings on one other key issue that you found interesting (from those listed above).
In order for students to be successful in a virtual school, they need to be very self-motivated and independent. Even at a young age, students need to learn how to manage their time and be responsible. In the state of Washington, Insight schools also hold their students to certain academic standards. For example, their high school students need to be reading at or above a 7th grade level (no more than two levels below their grade level), writing at 6th grade level or above, and have at least 5th grade math skills. I think this is a good idea and very important so that students don’t feel like that they are not being held to academic standards because they aren’t in a traditional school setting.
4. Think 2-3 years from now and discuss how virtual schools and online courses might impact your teaching.
I think that at the elementary school level, I would not encourage students to take entire courses online unless there were circumstances such as an illness or disability. I think that it would be a good idea to create a virtual environment for your students and their parents to be able to contact you and communicate with each other, such as a MySpace or a TeacherWeb. It may be beneficial to use certain online lesson plans for your students to get them familiar with using technology. Although I agree that technology skills are important for students to learn, I strongly believe that a large reason for students to go to school is to learn social interaction skills and how to work with people. Elementary school is often the first social setting that students will be exposed to besides their family, and by enrolling students in an online school, parents are depriving their children of many experiences.

Teacher Web Reflections

Having a teacher web site would support my future teaching by forcing me to be organized and up-to-date. It is much easier to keep a neat desk space if a lot of my work is done on the computer, and would save a lot of spaces to have students take review quizzes or submit assignments online. I believe that being more organized would help me be a more effective teacher. Also, it would be helpful with communicating the most up-to-date information to parents. Instead of sending home newsletter every time I have an announcement, I could simply change whatever needed to be changed on the website. This would also minimize the problem of students forgetting to give their parents things or having things getting lost between home and school.
I think having a class website would aid student learning in many ways. First of all, it would be very easy to integrate technology into any assignment by using a WebQuest for your lesson plan. Having computer skills is important for many aspects of a student's future, and I think it is wise to integrate them wherever it makes sense. Also, I think having a classroom website will help students to always know what is going on in the classroom and become more organized themselves. By having the homework assignments up online, they can check it every night instead of having to keep track of a piece of paper.
I feel that the two strongest pages on the TeacherWeb system are the Web Resources and Grades page. It is a good idea to have Web Resources page for your students because it will encourage them to use the Internet in a fun, safe, and educational way. I think it is also extremely beneficial to have grades online, even at the elementary school level due to efficiency, and reliability. With an online system for grade viewing, parents can track their student’s progress as the year goes on instead of waiting for progress reports. Also, you can be more sure this way that parents actually get to see their students’ grades and that progress reports won’t get lost between home and school.

Engaging Students with Concept Mapping

Concept maps are a great tool to use in an elementary school classroom for several purposes. They can be used for many subjects to get students to think in different ways. If I were to use concept-mapping software in my classroom, I would likely use it for social studies, math, or writing skills.
For social studies lessons, I would use concept mapping in the form of Venn Diagrams. I feel that Venn Diagrams would be very useful for comparing different groups of people or civilizations. I saw one example on the Kidspiration website that demonstrated the similarities and differences between Native Americans and Colonists. Based on this example, making Venn Diagrams for social studies lesson plans would be beneficial because it would force students to see similarities and make connections between things that they normally wouldn’t have seen.
In a math class, a concept map could be used for teaching fractions. I feel that teaching fractions to students is most effective when visuals are used. There was a terrific example on Kidspiration with an adding fractions problem. The problem showed 2/8 + 3/8= 5/8. Along with the typed problem, there was a picture of a bar divided into 8 pieces. Of those 8 pieces, 2 were colored yellow and three were colored red, which is helpful for visual learners. Concept mapping software could also be used with math to make visual aids for a story problem. This could transform math in a classroom by getting skeptical students to see it as a fun and artistic subject.
With older students, the primary way I would use concept-mapping software is to help them with organization when writing essays. Concept maps are good for helping students organize and distinguish the topics and details of their body paragraphs, as well as to help them see where they are missing information or could make connections between ideas.
Although I’m pretty sure that it would take me awhile to learn how use Concept mapping software to its full potential, I think it would be worthwhile if I was teaching an upper-elementary level class. Not only could I use concept mapping software for visual presentation aids, I would be able to teach the kids how to use the software to benefit their skills in many academic areas. However, I feel that younger students (K-1st graders) would probably become quickly frustrated with this software and it would take more instruction to teach it than is worthwhile.

Blogs and Wikis in Education

As schools progress toward the 21st century, teachers will begin to rely more on technology than ever before. Technology can make learning fun and interesting for the students, as well as create less paperwork for the teacher. There are many ways that teachers can integrate technology into their classroom, including educational blogs and Wikis, or RSS readers.
Educators have found many innovative ways to use blogs and Wikis. For example, Lewis Elementary school in Oregon has all of their school’s information on a Wiki. This means that students will never have to carry home a newsletter from the PTA or their teacher. Every teacher and specialist has a link to their individual blog on the main page, so parents and community members can assess any information related to the school. Another way to use a wiki is as a class guide or syllabus for older students. “Mr. Welker’s Wikinomics Guide” is a wiki that a high school economics teacher, Mr. Welker, made for his students as an online course guide. Blogs and Wikis are also a terrific resource for teachers. There are many blogs written by teachers to share ideas and experiences.
RSS readers would be a very interesting thing to integrate into classroom curriculum, particularly with older students. In a Current Events unit, a teacher could have each of their students subscribe to different online newspapers that may offer articles that relate to the current events the students are studying. RSS readers could also be used to help students with online research they may do for a project or a paper.
Many parents and educators are concerned about their young students using the internet because of privacy issues. Also, technology use in classroom can be frustrating to some students who do not have access to computers at home. However, with proper instruction and patience from their teacher, even these students can use to use technology proficiently. It will be very useful to students to have computer skills when they reach older grades and in real life.

Multiple Intelligences

I discovered after doing the Multiple Intelligence Inventory that I am highest in kinesthetic and naturalistic intelligence. According to surfaquarium.com, kinesthetic learners learn best through “hands on” learning and were described as “sensory, reflexive, and tactile”, among other things. Naturalistic learners enjoy being outside, categorizing things, and finding common traits among items. They were described as enjoying categorization and hierarchical reasoning, as well as having a schematic memory. I identified strongly with most of the attributes listed under each one of my two strong intelligences; except for I do not necessarily consider myself “coordinated”.
In a classroom setting, naturalistic learners enjoy using graphic organizers, organizing or collecting things, and learn very well using tables, charts, or diagrams. Kinesthetic learners enjoy hands-on activities, experimenting with activities in drama and/or music, and building physical representations of concepts.
To encourage students with these types of learning styles, I will make sure that I have a very stimulating learning environment. I will allow students to make physical representations of concepts sometimes instead of simply lecturing or giving a test. It will be very easy to make hands on activities for science experiments or art projects, as well as use manipulatives for math lessons. For naturalistic learners, I can encourage students to make graphic organizers and use graphs, tables, and charts in my explanations. Both of these types of intelligences can be very easily combined with lessons that encourage other learning strengths, and it is important to cater to all learning styles in the classroom.
I would hope to be able to use some fun technology, perhaps Wii, to incorporate kinesthetic learners into technology lessons. I feel as though it would be very difficult for most kinesthetic learners to sit at a computer for too long, so it would be fun to get them involved in a new way. Naturalistic learners would perhaps prefer to do science experiments with technology such as a magnifying glass or a microscope, which would appeal to kinesthetic learners as well because they are also very “hands-on” activities.
Having multiple intelligences represented in a classroom means being able to teach the same material in different ways so that all students can understand and apply the new material. Often, it is possible to cater to two or more learning styles at the same time while teaching a lesson. It is very important to be aware of individual student needs and make sure that all students have the opportunity to succeed. Knowing a student’s learning style can be very helpful when planning a lesson.

Welcome :)

Hey, this is my blog that I created for my tech class at WSU. I am excited to learn how this technology can be used in an elementary classroom.