Mentor+Meeting+Week+4

The whole GVS mentoring experience was very enlightening. I went into the experience with a few preconceived ideas as to how it might work. I really can only compare it to my own online course experience and with the experience that I had evaluating the Henry County online school and the Mythology GVS course that I previously evaluated. This experience was much different than the two other high school virtual school courses that i evaluated. This time I actually got to experience how the interaction works in this course. This class focuses heavily on the use of asynchronous tools like discussion boards for students to show what they know. I was surprised to see how much of the class is very similar to the face -to-face instruction that my students receive. The only true difference is the mode of communication and that is not entirely different. Students can still talk to the teacher in a face-to-face manner through the use of Adobe Connect. If there is a negative it might be that the virtual school class is not a learning environment meant for all students. I witnessed students with the same difficulties that my face-to-face students have, motivation. For a student to be successful in this type of learning environment they must have an internal force driving them towards their goal. Many of these students are needing this Math 4 class to graduate with their peers. If I had to guess the students that have given up on the class have had their struggles in a regular, face-to-face learning environment. Students that struggle in brick and mortar, in my opinion, have an even greater chance of struggling in the online or virtual school model. Students must simply be motivated to work independently in order to succeed in an online class. You don’t have someone standing over you an hour a day telling you to get tasks completed.

It was interesting to learn that this math 4 online class was just as rigorous as the one that I have co-taught at my high school. I think this type of eLearning will continue to grow and eventually become the norm in high school education of the future. I think that eventually local school districts will see the benefits of GVS and other online learning opportunities. Local school systems can supplement their course offerings that they would not normally have on campus. Local school districts can have student access to courses like Latin, Japanese, and AP courses that they may not have the resources or the money to otherwise offer.

I will be going forward as an advocate for online learning and specifically as an advocate for GVS. The courses they have here are rigorous and unlike some other distance learning courses students are actually learning from the instruction and they will be able to build on that knowledge in future endeavors.