"Children should not be shackled to
a one-size-fits-all school building the way they have been for the last 100
years," said Ronald Packard, chief executive officer of K12 Inc. Even
though that all sound good and dandy due to it “souningd” like technology would
only do good for students and their education, it seems that the negative
effects are being avoided. We should not live the same way as we did hundreds
of years ago, however, we have to realize all of the contributions that going
to school and interacting with one’s teachers and peers has on a student. Being
inside of a classroom teaches students how to communicate, share, interact,
explore, learn new things etc… Schooling has a huge effect on a child’s
personal skills, especially the younger children.
Then, the sad part is that, having these
online classes and/or schools has not produced any positive results yet. “…in
state after state, full-time online schools have posted poor test scores and
abysmal graduation rates”. Despite this, according to K12, for
students who stick to the online courses for several years, good results are
produced. I guess like any other new idea, it takes time for it to begin to
produce good results; however, the entire idea of online classes and/or courses
has started in the 1990s (before I was even born), so how long do they need to have
good results?
The article goes on to discuss how, “they find that many
actually lose ground in core academic subjects”. This is something that I mentioned in a previous blog that I
fear will happen. “Almost every cyber-school in Ohio ranked below average on
student academic growth in preliminary report published by the state last week.
A Stanford study last year found cyber-students in Pennsylvania made
"significantly smaller gains in reading and math" than peers in
traditional public schools”. Children are only children, and with the
virtual/online courses and classrooms, they can become too dependant on google,
wikipedia, dictionary.com, spell check etc…Like I mentioned in a previous blog,
I feel that in order to incorporate technology inside of the classroom, and to
produce good results, first teachers have to make sure that the students have a
good, solid foundation of the material first.
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