No school for two days. Monday and tuesday will be home learning for our whole school. Which meant that we need not go to school but have to stay at home to well, learn. Teachers will post online lesson packages on their web and we students will visit the web and complete assignments with the help of the online notes. Students get excited about this as they need not go to school and could spend half the day in the computer. I agree. But thinking again, is home learning a beneficial learning platform and suitable for schools to embark this approach permanently?
It do have it's benefits. Like last year's H1N1 case, schools has to stop for a week. The home learning has came into good use. A week of lesson is rather essential for teachers and students. If they miss it, I will take a long time for them to catch up and teachers has to quicken their teaching pace. The home learning will serve as a great temporary learning platform to allow students to catch up and get an idea of the topic in the syllabus. It will also help when they get back to school afetr the break. The timng of the online lessons will be more flexible and allows students to end their lessons earlier if they finish it quickly. Hence, such teaching is really helpful and allows students to cope with their work when they go back to school for lessons.
However, let's think it in another way. For example, if a school wanted to try out this home learning programme for a year, do you think it's feasible? In my opinion this will leads to some problems if such home learning activities is to be embarked for long term teaching. Basically, it will leads to failure in teaching, social problems and health problems.
Firstly, failure in teaching. It actually meant that teachers may not be able finish covering syllabus or failed to make students understand certain topics. This is because, as experienced today, the whole school internet portal was not able to accessed to due to the number of people logging on at the same time. Thus, this cannot goes on if lessons were like this everyday as there may be miscommunication or failure to convey messages. Besides, if one's system crashed or stops working, the whole learning process will be disrupted. Students may also face problems when they wanted to ask teachers question as it is not as simple as a face to face question. Even if it's a yes or no question may take some time. Thus, there are still flaws that should be eradicated.
Secondly, social problems. Students are exposed to the net all days. It will be impossible for them not to get distracted and log on to facebooks or online games. Hence, addiction in computer games may happens. Besides, it will also leads to discipline problems. The students will not be too driven to complete their work even if a date line is given since there will not be any punishment for late submissions. Even if there is, what could it be? Will it really deter students from being sloppy in their work. And how are students going to get tested? They could just go to the web and fing out all the answers. Integrity issues. Besides, students will lose contacts with friends and will lose interacting skills. Long term home learning may leads to such serious social problems. So, is it still feasible? Or there are any alternative ways to look at it?
Lastly, health problems. Staring at the computer for the day may leads to serious eye problems. Degrees of myopia may increase. It is definitely not healthy to stay in front of the monitor the w hole day. Students will not get active since there's not any period called physical education for home learning. Hence, leading to obessity or irregular diets as students may not follow the timetable for lunch or recess.
So, will long term home learning be feasible, same as the current teaching methods or even better? Please feel free to state your views.
Personally I did not enjoy the whole home learning proccess as I found out that the Internet is not a good teaching platform. Firstly, I believe that the biggest problem with this home learning, as you said, is that it is a failure in teaching. It was indeed many teachers utilised this 2 days to cover what they had no time to cover, it was as much as a whole chapter. We could not fully understand the whole chapter because of that. Also, the instructions for all the assignments were also not very clear, thus resulting in many misunderstandings. And lastly, the time given for each subject for this term's home learning was too short as some of the teachers did not give assignments that could be completed in an hour so I suggest that the old (2009 Term 3) time table should be put to use instead of the new one. And to Dany's question, my answer is no, it is not feasible. Even with the improvement of technology, we cannot fully rely on the Internet and thus the current teaching methods (face to face) is better.
ReplyDeleteRui Yu