201–210 of 211 posts
My kids cant wait to finish their school day (remote) and jump on to Roblox, Playstation, etc
I'm no programmer, but surely there is scope to gamify parts of the curriculum.. I'm trying to imagine some hack'n'slash dungeon crawler with lessons included by stealth.
I think one issue is the idea that you can take a few pieces of quality "content", thread through them and have a meaningful course. Mastery is a great thing to talk about -- what is it exactly? For most, it's doing well enough to get a certain mark on a test. But I'd argue what you want is to ensure that learners use concepts they have mastered in a demonstrative way -- but again, this is harder and will cost more. It would be great if education was concerned about deeper understanding, but right now the focus seems to be "will this be on the test".
I think you need good subject matter experts to team up with a tech person to create curated material. You also need some way to ask questions if you get stuck on something.
I gave it a shot at teaching a few lessons on how to program with Scratch to grades 1-5. I setup 3 simple lessons ( see my profile ) and provided a way for kids to ask questions via a simple form.
The last thing you need is time with the kids in my opinion, kids will show interest in something if you are taking part in it.
My children are 16, 15, 14. They are all currently homeschooling in UK lockdown number 3. All of their lessons are delivered via video (Google Classrooms). The quality of learning seems low, they seem unengaged and only respond to teacher when absolutely forced to. As a parent all I really do is IT support and discourage distraction (put your phone down etc). In UK lockdown 1 in March there was no video learning. Tas…
It seems like they have now managed to accurately replicate the average UK classroom, I'm sorry to say.
Neither of these are likely to be ideal ways of learning.
From what I recall, research shows that people often believe they have learned a lot by watching a video, but when tested they are often unable to identify the key ideas they were being taught.
Students ideally need personal feedback and a direction to focus on. To be able to ask questions and interact with what they don't yet fully understand. To be listened to and understood.
Remote classrooms can be organised to match what happens in an effective classroom (here simplified): the teacher introduces the key learning goals and to set out some relevant tasks with examples, then walks around the classroom giving their time to students 1-1 while the other students work independently on their tasks (likely in a way that allows them to discuss their understanding with each other, with access to reference materials including the internet), and brings the class together as necessary and at the end of the session.
Being sat together in a Zoom call for an hour (or ultimately many hours a day) is not accurately reflecting what is really happening in a good classroom, except in the presentee-ism aspect.
MOOCs and, in general, sources of pure content are generally not personalised enough to engage most people beyond the first lecture. They can't predict what a student will need support with, and don't proactively act on this - whereas schoolteachers can and do. CS50x is an extremely high quality MOOC and only ~2% of registered students are destined to ever complete the semester's worth of work.
Reaching mastery best will involve using the resources we have in human teachers: teachers to guide learning.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coming from a different country I don't really know why remote is not the default option. Listening to a professor speaking to himself from a distance of 10 meters is an awful experience compared to a video recording that you can stop/rewind. Heck, you can even take some proper notes that you will actually understand! For labs it's not like you get any help either. You just have to follow some instructions point by p…
> Listening to a professor speaking to himself from a distance of 10 meters is an awful experience compared to a video recording that you can stop/rewind. Heck, you can even take some proper notes that you will actually understand! Ok. That's a win for remote. Now my turn: how easy is it to gauge the mood of your entire class, turn to the person next to you and whisper a question or look at their notes? Go for coffee…
Person next to you has the same low quality notes you do. In my group we designated a single person to take notes and after the class you just snapped a photo, since no other materials were provided. Other people were listening and trying to understand the subject. Taking notes is distracting you from learning.
Making friends in a class of 100-200 people is hard. My friend went to a Berlin university. You are just a number there. I find it much easier to engage in a discussion using a forum.
> Meet older students
How do you approach them? You have no idea who they are. You are never in class with them. University is basically the same model as high school here. You are not picking subjects or classes, you have to follow a script. You only meet students of your year.
There are some sorts of after hours interest circles, but they start after your 6 hours of learning.
Peer learning can also be done online or after an online course.
The good parts of university are the ones that can be done outside of it, hence there's no need to visit the building at all.