Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Online Gambling comes to New Jersey - NOT a good thing.
WHEN will they put - Education - Online?

1 comment:

Alisandra Wederich said...

If you haven't seen "Waiting for Superman," the documentary on the American Public School System yet, I highly recommend it. It reveals the unfortunate truth that as much as good teachers and good educators try to make improvements and really turn school systems around, they face a lot of hurdles - one of the primary being the teacher's union.

The teacher's union protects teachers with tenure and makes it nearly impossible to fire them or lay them off, even if they can't keep up with a school's attempts to incorporate more technology. Additionally, through efforts of trying to meet the "No Child Left Behind," program which was also poorly designed and puts a lot of stress on specific subject matter and tests that are enough to take up most of a teacher's curriculum (assuming they are teaching core subjects like English, Science, or Math), many teachers feel like they don't have the time to learn new technology and stay on top of its constantly changing ways.

I think what public schools need is for there to be a head of technology for each department - someone whose specific job is to find the best online programs, software, technology, etc... for a specific subject and who can help teachers incorporate such technologies into the curriculum with ease. From there, a transition to predominantly online schooling would seem a natural progression.

Private schools which do not have teacher's unions and are not held to the same rules and standards as state-funded schools have already built online schools that exist in New Jersey. So there IS online education available, if you search for it, and can afford a private online school. It's getting all the public schools to catch up and make necessary changes that it the hard part.