Educations electronic elixir
By Jamie Melbourne-Hayward
As schools become more tech-savvy teachers are beginning to embrace different tools such as blogs [an internet or web log] and wikis. Wikis are online blogging forums where students can write ideas and answer questions posted by teachers. Hutt Valley High physics teacher Richard Edwards runs a wiki page for his Year 12 students. ?I post web resources set homework, and use a lot of You Tube material as references. ?Some US university physics websites are particularly good; it?s a great resource for another explanation,? he says. Mr Edwards says for both teachers and students? knowledge of how best to utilise the technology is a factor holding back full utilisation of the medium. ?The future of Web 2.0 will be progressive for teaching, and interaction is a key part. ?It would be great to train teachers; they are the generation that need to meet those criteria.? Many kids use IT for recreation, and Mr Edwards says although it?s a big ask to get education included in their online time the way that information is presented ?means it can be easily grasped?. Onslow College social science teacher Thomas Johnson says blogs are a fantastic teaching aid. ?We run our own in-house programmes using wikis and blogs. It?s a great way for students to share notes, and as a revision tool it works exceedingly well.? Mr Johnson says he posts information and questions to online forums and lets students work out the details between themselves. ?It helps students make the connections themselves, and correct each other.? He says for senior students half of their work is at school and the other half is ?self-regulated learning outside of school?, which is greatly helped by access to online guidance. ?Online peer and teacher reviews are an advantage, it saves me making the same comment on different students work, and they co-construct answers between themselves. ?Often I just come along at the end and point out the few things they have missed ? it works really well.? Online posting helps keep paperwork to a minimum, saving the ?photocopying budget?, and keeping hand-outs in one easy accessible place. Plagiarism is an issue with readily available information on websites such as Wikipedia and Google. ?We have a pretty good idea of when something has been plagiarised. ?We get them to show us their notes, to see they have broken down the ideas and come up with their own answers, not a lot of plagiarism actually occurs,? says Mr Johnson. However, a ?digital divide? still hampers the schools ability to fully utilise online forums. ?There is a grey area around access to the technology because it?s not evenly spread. ?There is a lot of potential to use it as a supplement to learning, because it?s not a core part of the curriculum. ?We only have three computer rooms in the whole school, it?s not really working,? he says.
