Technology in Schools

As I began reading twitter post last week, I came across this article on technology from Jackie Kuchy.   The information covered in the article regarded online education.  The article was found in The Wall Street Journal on Saturday, November 12th.  The web address is:  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204358004577030600066250144.html.  The article's titled, "My Teacher Is an App: More kids than ever before are attending school from their living rooms, bedrooms and kitchens" The article describes a radical rethinking of how education works. 

In today's economy, education systems across the US are suffering due to extreme budget cuts.  Therefore, Cyber-schools, and Hybrid Schools are beginning to replace the traditional school across the United States.  "If it seems strange, that's because it is strange," says Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of the Miami schools. He sees no point in forcing the iPod generation to adapt to a classroom model that has changed little in 300 years. States and districts nationwide are launching online public schools that let students from kindergarten to 12th grade take some—or all—of their classes from their bedrooms, living rooms and kitchens. 

Nationwide, an estimated 250,000 students are enrolled in full-time virtual schools, up 40% in the last three years.  One promising approach, many experts say, is hybrid schools, which blend online study with face-to-face interaction with teachers."Schools teach people the skills of citizenship—how to get along with others, how to reason and deliberate, how to tolerate differences," says Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of educational history at New York University.  The growth of cybereducation is likely to affect school staffing, which accounts for about 80% of school budgets. A teacher in a traditional high school might handle 150 students. An online teacher can supervise more than 250, since he or she doesn't have to write lesson plans and most grading is done by computer.  Obviously, we all want to save money," he says. "But to replace teachers with online learning is a mistake.  

The students who work closely with parents and teachers will do much better than basically letting them educate themselves, that's not going to be a good educational experience.  The computer, can't do it alone. Recent studies prove that students enrolled in online classes lag behind students in a traditional academic setting.