Sunday, January 31, 2010

Education goes where students go: online (Lancaster Online)

Education goes where students go: online (Lancaster Online)

Education goes where students go: online (Lancaster Online)

Posted: 30 Jan 2010 09:30 PM PST

If you think a gaggle is a group of geese, let teens and teachers enlighten you.

Gaggle is also a Web site (Gaggle.net) where students do homework. And it's not the only silly-sounding online tool connecting home and school.

Moodles, wikis, Google docs and Facebook are the new means for group study, homework assignments and collaborative projects. Even virtual lockers are reducing backpack loads.

Educators have harnessed such online applications to engage today's "technology-native" students. And students are responding.

"We're in their world," said Diane Patton, science coordinator for the School District of Lancaster.

Perhaps a quick primer on this online-study world is in order.

•Facebook is an online social networking Web site (Facebook.com).

•Moodle is a course-management Web site (Moodle.org) where students collaborate on projects, complete homework, take quizzes and more.

•Google docs is an online program where students can create and edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations. The documents are stored online and only accessible to those with permission (such as teachers and classmates).

•Wikis are Web sites (Wikispaces.com) that allow students and teachers to collaboratively create, modify and organize Web-page content. Students can work on projects together, do homework and communicate with their teachers on wikis.

"I like the wiki because you don't have 50 million papers in your locker," McCaskey High School junior Chelsea Erb, 17, said. "And for the Gaggle you can just turn [homework] in and you don't have to print out all these papers."

Such resources are operated on closed servers and are monitored by teachers for student safety. Only teachers and other classmates can access their virtual classrooms.

"A kid cannot sneeze on Moodle without me knowing about it," McCaskey teacher Jon Hess said.

Since Hess started using online tools, more homework is completed, grades have improved, and behavior problems have decreased, he said.

"The more [online] access they have, the more they do," Hess said.

Students without home Internet access can still study with textbooks and notebooks. Or, they can access the Internet through school or public libraries, Patton explained.

Most kids, however, have some degree of Internet access, said Fred Griffiths, technology integration coach for Warwick High School.

"When they tell me they don't have Internet, I ask them, 'Do you have a Facebook page?' and they say 'Yes,' " Griffiths said. "So they do use it somewhere."

McCaskey senior Tu Ha, 17, studies with classmates, but not in person. They use Facebook, a social networking site. Ha also likes having textbooks and homework online so he can work ahead or stay on track during an absence, he said.

Erb has not one, but four, computers in her home with Internet access.

"Everything they do is online," her mother, Missy Lloyd, 36, said of her five children's school work.

"We didn't have any of this growing up," she said. "I didn't even have a computer."

"This is all I have to bring home," her daughter said, holding up a binder.

Griffiths, the technology integration coach at Warwick, gets teachers up to speed with online tools.

He views online tools as "an extension of the classroom," he said. "True learning is a social activity and computers will never replace teachers. But it can replace a lot of the practice, the resources."

"I think there is something to be said for good old-fashioned pen and pencil," said Diane Shirk, a 10-year teaching veteran at Warwick High School. "But I think the reality is this is their future and they're going to need to be able to do this."

More than 200 classes at the high school use Moodle to some degree, Griffiths said.

With online resources, students can do projects with digital scrapbooking, photos, video, audio and more.

Students in one class posed as characters in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and had first-person discussions using Moodle, Griffiths said.

In another class, students collaborated to write a play using Moodle, he said.

"They are self-directed learners, willing to try new tools," said Keith Floyd, director of curriculum, instruction and assessment for Warwick School District. "They ask, 'May I do this with this tool?' ... So they really become champions of their own learning."

Forget dioramas or collages of magazine cutouts. Students in Shirk's social studies class have used online tools to tell stories about World War II.

They wrote play scripts using Google docs, made their own movies and made photo slide shows with their own narration.

Michele Witmyer teaches English and French at Warwick. She posts assignments, podcasts and links to Web sites for her students.

"It was very helpful when I had so many kids out from swine flu," she said. She also pairs students from different classes to peer-edit work on Moodle.

"I was a little skeptical at first and I'm working harder than I have before, but it's a good thing," said Witmyer, who has taught for 27 years. "It's not just throwing in technology for the sake of technology. For me, it has to have an educational purpose.

"I do see kids doing a lot more outside of class," she said. "I find kids able to work together with each other at home, allowing more class time [for other things]."

Hess said, "The more access they have, the more they do."

"They're technology natives," said Lori Zimmerman, public relations coordinator for Warwick School District. "It's what they're already doing. They're group learners and they're good at it."

 


Jeannette Scott is a Sunday News staff writer.

 

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)