Distance Education

1. Identify and briefly discuss 5 advantages of distance education.
1) Flexibility: Students can take and do assignments and their learning at their own pace instead of having time restrictions in a physical classroom.
2) Variety of Classes Offered: online classes can be more varied than physical classrooms because it is virtual.
3) Low Costs: Transportation costs for the parents is lowered because they don't have to take their child to and from school. Material costs for the school districts is lowered because there are less physical materials...assignments are turned in digitally instead of on paper.
4) Avoiding Bad Weather School Cancellations: School doesn't have to stop just because the bus can't come! Unless of course, your electricity goes out, and in that case you probably deserve the day off anyway.
5) Can Hold a Job and Go to School at the Same Time: High school students have the opportunity to arrange their school and work schedules to provide a balanced lifestyle.

2. Identify and briefly discuss 5 disadvantages of distance education.
1) No physical spaces like Libraries, Gyms or Playgrounds: Students learn in one exact place the whole time..in front of their computer. Occasional and infrequent field trips cannot compare with PE every other day in the Gymnasium.
2) No Face to Face Interaction with the other Students: Especially for younger students in the primary grades, learning new faces, hearing new voices is mentally stimulating. Lack of these might potentially harm the learning of young students.
3) No Interaction with the Teacher: Students sometimes need to have the intimading presence of a teacher to get them going on assignments, this role could probably be filled by involved parents but the likelihood of that always occuring when needed is significantly lower for online schooling.
4) Behavior Issues aren't focused on, only Ignored: The students who use online schooling because of behavior issues aren't being helped..their problems aren't being dealt with...just worked around by using online schooling.
5) Decline of Physical Writing Skills: The legitimacy of students writing might go down if they never actually write anything, only type answers onto the computer to submit. People will always need to write legitimately.

3. How you would determine the readiness of students to participate in distance education?
You would have to determine their ability to work and complete assignments on their own, stimulate their own thinking, use technology expertly and have the work ethic to be a good online student. To do this, stuents would probably need to take some sort of diagnostic assignment/unit lesson which they complete online in the same sort of way they would do their online learning. Then, the online school administrators would determine if the students were capable of excelling in the online schooling environment. Paremt involvement would be CRUCIAL for determining if their child would be capable of doing well using online classes.

4. What would you need to do to be ready to teach in an online environment?
As a teacher, I would need to have taken specialty courses in how to teach in the online school environment. I would need to have a super fast, very smart computer also. And programs like skype downloaded and be proficient with such programs. I would also need to have massive amounts of time to dedicate to answering student e-mails/questions/ grade assignments.

Engaging Students with Concept Mapping Activities

1. 2-3 paragraph summary of the 3-5 ideasexplored for how you could use Concept Mapping within your future classroom.

Concept mapping is a graphic organizer that has many benefits, including helping recall, assisting in understanding visually, and organizing the thoughts of students into meaningful parts. Concept mapping can be fun for the students and visually more appealing than just a basic list.
The first interesting concept mapping idea I came across was a “Main Idea Mountain”. The “Main Idea Mountain” was a triangle with four boxes at the bottom that diverged into two boxes, which then diverged into one top box equaling the main idea. The second interesting concept mapping idea I found was the “Topic Flower”. The “Topic Flower” was a circle with 5 petals. The circle was the main idea, the petals were 5 relating ideas.
The third interesting concept mapping idea I stumbled across was the “Topic Turtle”. The “Topic Turtle” was basically a picture of a turtle from above. The turtle had a head, four feet and a small tail. His shell comprised of the boxes you write the ideas in. The shell had a heptagon (7 sides) in its center and 7 sections spreading from that. The heptagon was where the main idea went; the 7 sections were relating ideas or sub-topics.
The fourth interesting concept mapping idea I found was the “”Character Body”. The “Character Body” was a picture of a person. The head was the character’s name, the chest/torso was a short physical description, the left arm was where names of the character’s friends went, the right arm had the names of the character’s enemies in it. The two legs both have things the character said and did in them.
The fifth interesting concept mapping idea I found was the “Question Hand”. The “Question Hand” asked who, what, when, where, why and how of something. The palm of the hand was the how description, the thumb was who, and the four fingers were the what, when, where, and why questions.

2. Discuss what you see as the impact of the use of Concept mapping might have on student learning within your future classroom. Give some details to support your statements.

Concept mapping can have a significant positive impact on student learning. Student who are visual learners will excell with the use of concept mapping. Concept mapping is a good way to organize lots of information into basic parts. For example, the above "Photosynthesis Process" concept map only has a small amount of text, but the arrows and pictures provide lots of information and simplify the process. Sometimes, simplifying a process in science and breaking it down into basic parts BEFORE delving into specific details can help students get a clear understanding of the general ideas.

3.Discuss at least 2 criteria that you would use to decide whether or not Concept Mapping activities would be part of a lesson for your students.

The first criteria I would use would be "Can this lesson be best taught using technology like concept mapping?" If it is something like the photosynthesis process, then yes,of course your students can benefit from using a concept map. If it is something like math lessons where you are explaining Long Division, then probably your objective is not going to be met while using a concept map. The second criteria I would use would be "Can this topic be broken down into meaningful parts or will this topic be too complicated for a concept map?" If the topic is theoretical or contains many complicated ideas, would a simple diagram be adequate enough to use? These are things I would take into consideration before starting a concept mapping activity.