Blended learning is just the bees knees. I'm not kidding, "blended learning is any time a student learns at least in part at a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home and at least in part through online delivery with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace." Isn't that fantastic? Teaching students can be done by countless means. One of those means happens to be technology. Teaching students solely from what they observe and copy is one thing, but teaching students to use their fine motor skills (and motor skills in general for that matter), concentrate on quick reflexes from brain to fingers, answer questions correctly to continue on with an activity or actually acknowledge the fact that you are prepared, and to explore the potentials of the ever growing technology of today opens up a whole new world from them; many may not be able to comprehend this new world, but with blending learning, students get ahead in the game.
Right?
Although I am all for blended learning... I do think there are a couple flaws in the system. 1-to-1 learning is a fantastic luxury for students and can make education for students much easier -gives students without computer access a way to do their online assignments at home, gives students the opportunity for blended learning, can speed up assignments and give you access to more creative ways for doing projects, etc.-, but I think it may hold some students back a little bit. Could the 1-to-1 computer access be stealing children's focus and causing them to remember less classroom content? Now, some students may have short attention spans or lose focus regardless of having the computer access or not.
However, giving students access
However, giving students access
to a virtually infinite amount of websites and content of all kinds may not draw the students attention to the teacher's lesson. Can you imagine the number of times the average student with 1-to-1 computer access gets distracted by a website on their computer and misses an important point in class? I know I definitely got distracted when I was in high school!
Now, how do we keep the students interested in the subject at hand when they have another world with endless technological possibilities at their fingertips?
Luckily, Apple employees came up with a way to keep your students on track called Apple Remote Desktop, as did Stoneware with their product LanSchool and Smart with their product SMART technologies. With these systems, teachers, professors, and instructors of all sorts can monitor the computer screens of every computer connected to the system from their own computers. This program allows teachers to monitor student's screens, type comments/messages to their students on their screens, and even shut down a students computer if they notice them playing a game, looking at a blog, or otherwise being distracted by the content on their computer; in short, if students aren't paying attention, the teacher will know, and they will fix that.
Thanks technology, you have a solution to everything.
