I guess Thanksgiving bumped my November newspaper article\u00a0– and it landed in\u00a0today’s paper:<\/p>\n\n\n
As I have mentioned in this space before, my wife and I are\ncurrently raising funds to move our family to Haiti where we will teach at\nCowman School.\u00a0 In the meantime, I am teaching\nhigh school Language Arts to several students there long distance over the\ninternet.<\/p>\n\n\n
\u201cDo you understand what plagiarism is?\u201d I recently found\nmyself asking one of my students as I stared into the webcam perched on top of\nmy laptop.<\/p>\n\n\n
\u201cYes, yes.\u00a0 I know\nwhat plagiarism is,\u201d he answered from his classroom in Haiti.<\/p>\n\n\n
Then, just as our discussion was about to get more\ninteresting (and more personal), the image of my student\u2019s face disappeared\nfrom the laptop and our Skype connection was lost for the remainder of the day.<\/p>\n\n\n
And once again I was reminded of the limits of technology.<\/p>\n\n\n
Online classes have been growing in popularity in the U.S.\nfor several years now.\u00a0 They first gained\nacceptance at the college level and are now making inroads into secondary\nschools (can primary schools be far behind?).\u00a0\nWhen I taught at Hauser, we used online courses regularly to enable\nstudents with failing grades to recover credits without having to make room in\ntheir schedules to repeat a class.<\/p>\n\n\n
The more familiar I get with online classes, the more I find\nit is a love\/hate relationship.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
On the one hand, online courses provide amazing\nflexibility.\u00a0 If tomorrow morning, one of\nmy students in Haiti wakes up in the mood for math, he can open his geometry\ncourse.\u00a0 And he can spend fifteen minutes\nthere or three hours, with no bell to dictate a move to a different subject.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
I have to love the flexibility online courses afford\nstudents, parents and schools.\u00a0 Without\nonline curricula, in fact, there would be no Cowman High School in Haiti: the\nstudent body is much too small to be able to afford a full high school staff.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
But that flexibility inherent to online classes is a\ndouble-edged sword.\u00a0 It becomes a test of\nself-motivation, discipline and time management for the student. If I am\nphysically present to distribute a vocabulary quiz, for example, my students\nare forced to prove their retention in that next fifteen minutes. If that same\nquiz shows up in their Yahoo inbox, though, it can be effectively ignored for\nhours, if not days.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
On my end, this experience with long distance education has\nreminded me that no matter how sophisticated our technology, there really is no\nsubstitute for a flesh and blood teacher\u2019s presence.\u00a0 And it\u2019s not just to crack the whip and keep\nstudents on task.\u00a0 Fostering creativity,\nchecking comprehension and discussing important ideas do not happen easily or\nnaturally via satellite.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Technology falls short. That Haitian classroom needs a\nteacher on site.\u00a0 And that reality\ncontinually motivates me to keep working to raise the finances necessary to\nmove my family there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I guess Thanksgiving bumped my November newspaper article\u00a0– and it landed in\u00a0today’s paper: As I have mentioned in this space before, my wife and I are currently raising funds to move our family to Haiti where we will teach at Cowman School.\u00a0 In the meantime, I am teaching high school Language Arts to several students […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3809"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3809\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3810,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3809\/revisions\/3810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}