TECHNOLOGY & SOCIAL
Julie Taylor, Head of School, at The Bridge School, outlines what makes for an excellent – and complete – digital education programme.
O
ver the past two decades, digital learning has evolved into a legitimate, rigorous, and viable education option for millions of learners
across the globe. This process of understanding the learning needs of both students and teachers in the virtual realm take years of study, leaps in technology advancements, and having the appropriate tools to enhance the educational experience. Travel back with me to the year 2003. I was a third-year elementary teacher, jumping into one of the United States’ first virtual K-8 schools. When the school year began, we had just 75 brave students and parents across Arizona, willing to forge into the unknown world of virtual learning. For most students, the local brick and mortar type of school was not meeting their needs; either emotional, physical, or educational. In this new school, most of the curriculum was online. Students were independently moving through the curriculum. Parents would fax or mail work samples to me through the US Postal Service. As the teacher, I would have regular conference calls with the parents and students to determine the students’ academic progress. This was a manual process which took a lot of time and organization.
A few years later, online meeting rooms started
popping up. Services like Zoom and GoToMeeting allowed teachers (and others) to meet virtually, use web cameras and utilize whiteboards to engage students. This was quite possibly the most pivotal tool in online learning. However simple it seems to create and schedule live web sessions, the truth is that online synchronous classes take time to plan and even greater effort to engage students. I had the wonderful opportunity to lead a national group of instructional coaches whose sole purpose was to work with virtual teachers on their live instruction. We studied and observed hundreds of hours of live web- based teaching. We learned and further developed best practices in small group instruction. We led professional development sessions focused on student engagement, academic feedback, and standards-based learning.
Fast forward to March 2020; COVID 19 put the entire world in a tailspin. Schools and teachers around
| Think Global People & Relocate Magazine |
relocateglobal.com | 27
the globe were scrambling to find online resources for their students to maintain some type of learning. Many schools made assignments “optional” during this time and too often, learning came to a halt. For the 2020-21 school year, a majority of schools around the globe have had to implement some type of “distance learning” or what I like to call “emergency distance learning”. Emergency distance learning has been implemented with varying degrees of success. I have literally watched schools require students to be on Zoom meetings for 5 hours per day. I have seen schools report record numbers of truancy and failure rates. This is not a knock on the hard- working teachers out there trying to make education “work” through the pandemic. This is simply to say that all distance learning opportunities are not created equally.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56
