I'm Sara Gerstein and I am a New York City Public School teacher and a student at Teachers College. I am in my fifth year of teaching and I teach 10th grade Science (Earth Science) at a high school in Washington Heights. Over the years I have also taught 6th, 7th, and 8th grade. I was a Geology major at Cornell (undergrad) so I love Earth Science! I also direct the school musical - this year we are doing Bye Bye Birdie. I am currently in the Communication in Education program at TC.
When getting my Masters at City College (CUNY) I took two classes online through Seminars on Science (part of the Natural History Museum here in NYC). I got a lot out of those classes and I wanted to try online classes again. The content of the classes were really interesting; that is probably what made the class a positive experience for me. It was a successful model for graduate level classes but I wonder how successful it can be in a K-12 situation.
I'm interested in figuring this out - I'm curious how online learning can complement an in-school education. The school I work at is very small so we struggle with finding time and teachers to offer credit recovery classes for students who fail courses. (We previously had after school courses taught by teachers at our school, but this is not really a sustainable option) I would love to explore ways to offer this online to make it more manageable for all involved. As far as bringing the online world into my classroom so far - I have not done too much. I have a rarely updated class website and I'm exploring using some websites (like Study Island) for formative assessment. Hopefully I'll learn a lot more this semester!
Sara - I connected to a lot of the points your made. I, too, am mostly interested in how online classes can be used in a K-12 environment, but more specifically for students younger than high school age. I used to teach middle school and now teach elementary school.
ReplyDeleteIt seems like an online course experience, whether independent or in small groups, could be very beneficial to students of all backgrounds. Even though you have a small school, do you find your building would have the necessary resources to give more than just credit recovery students the opportunity to take online classes? I know that my school would have more of a challenge with the technical aspect rather than the challenge of time.
Hsaksa-
ReplyDeleteYou are very right - the actual physical resources are very difficult! We are lucky to have a computer lab that would at least be available after school but during the day every room is used every period of the day! I definitely have problems when I just use laptops in my class - we don't have enough, batteries die, some won't connect to the internet....so in some ways we are lucky with a computer lab but in other ways it is very difficult!
I too am interested in how the face to face classes can be assisted through online learning. I have been working at this for a while with both success and failure. In some ways, I find when kids are in an online only class, they take all of the online activities very seriously. When the activities are part of a live class, they don't always do so. You have to make the online activities very compelling. The novelty of it can wear out fast. One place that I had success is with blogging. It not only allows kids to express themselves, but also to comments on each other (they get so little time to do this in class). I have my students starting a themed blogging project. I would love to here some of your experiences.
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