My experience as a high school student had
a very even blend of technology and traditional learning in the classroom. All
students were given new laptops as freshmen by the school board and were able
to use them in all classes for the rest of their high school career. Some
classes were able to utilize this technology in better capacities than others.
We had specific technology classes that showed uses and applications of
laptops from video editing, all the way to simple coding.
Despite the classes I had that were specifically formatted to utilize our technology,
I never found myself doing much with my laptop other than typing notes, writing
papers, and creating an occasional presentation. In fact, I rarely if ever used
my technology in a math class. However, another neighboring district offered
several math classes that were taken entirely online with video instruction
from an out-sourced teacher and with online homework. I initially thought this
was a great idea for smaller school districts (such as my own) that had trouble
staffing teachers. However, as I learned more about the courses and the way
they were actually being taught, I gained an entirely different perspective.
As a future educator, I have
some major gripes with the way that online classes were taught. First, I do not like the limited contact with
teachers. As I have said, there are instances where this may be a district's
only option. For instance, my neighboring school district used this as a way to
offer classes that it would not be able to otherwise, such as pre-calculus and
calculus. However, the students in those classes were only able to interact with their teachers during the allotted class times, and this interaction was over the
internet through a video monitor. Not only this, but their class time may have
been shared with several other districts trying to offer the same class. This
means that students from one district would have to compete with the students
from the other district for time to have questions answered by the teacher.
In larger schools, a student would probably be able to ask a district math teacher about their questions. However, in a school district like mine this may not be the case because of staffing
issues. This led to obvious problems with student learning--a lack of help with homework.
This course used an interesting
mode of homework delivery. The assignments were given on the online homework
platform WebAssign, where the questions were instantly graded for the answer but the students were also required to submit handwritten solutions that they did on their laptop. It was not a huge issue to write the
solutions since the laptops had a swivel-top
and touch screen for easy writing. However, this created a huge problem of
cheating between districts that were in the same course. The assignments had to be completed on a rigid schedule.
The schedule, along with the fact that students could not easily access a teacher for
help, led to cheating between districts. A student
from one district could work out all of the solutions for an assignment, and e-mail it to a student from the other district. Students could then
change the size or colors of solutions, and since the teachers generally graded
by district, cheating would go unnoticed. In addition, students would use online math solvers to get their homework done.
These are just some of the cons
of outsourced learning. However, I think that if done correctly, an
outsourced class could be a great opportunity to offer a class that would
otherwise be unavailable to students. I hope to learn more about outsourced
teaching and other technology related solutions to staffing issues during this
semester in Math 371.
Kyle Koch
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