Blog Post #13

My Teacher Is an App

By Stephanie Banchero and Stephanie Simon

"My Teacher Is an App" is a very interesting article that was recently published in The Wall Street Journal. This article explains how education is radically changing for some school districts in our country. Traditional classrooms are being replaced with "cyber classrooms." Students are learning from the comfort of their own homes using their computers. "Nationwide, an estimated 250,000 students are enrolled in full-time virtual schools, and more than two million students take at least one class online." The main states mentioned in the article with online schooling programs were Virginia, Idaho, Georgia, and Florida. Some of theses districts are running their own online schools, but others have hired technology driven corporations to run these online programs for profit. These programs are in the experimental stages and they seem to be "fueled by budget constraints within districts, parental dissatisfaction with schools, and the failure of even top performing students to keep up with their peers in other industrialized countries." 

Critics of these cyber classrooms quote test scores that show full-time online students are performing below that of the students in the traditional classrooms on standardized tests. Another complaint seems to be that online students sometimes have difficulty contacting the teachers of these online programs to get the extra assistance they may need. Teacher unions are also criticizing these programs for affecting teachers' jobs because an online high school teacher can supervise over 250 students where as a traditional classroom high school teacher can only handle about 150 students. There is also always the question of socialization. How is that occurring if the students are not personally interacting?

It seems that there are still lots of looming questions about the future of K-12 online education. I do not think you can just give a student a laptop and they will be able to guide themselves through their own educational journey. They still need a teacher or a parent to closely guide them. One of the teachers at the Georgia Cyber Academy even said, "Letting a child educate himself is not going to be a good educational experience." Computers can not do it alone. I do think technology needs to be a major part of our classroom, and it seems that the classrooms that they spoke of that were most successful were the blended ones. These classrooms were a combination of online learning and in-person instruction. This is where I feel the education system would be more successful, and that is the direction in which I think we should be headed.