Student Web Sites Create Paperless Classrooms
Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Technologies Changing Education
Oct 17, 2009
The bell rings at a suburban junior high school in Ohio, and 25 enthusiastic seventh-graders scurry into a new computer lab, sit down without direction and fire up their PCs. The screens tingle in neon blue and before you can say Windows Vista, these new-millennium students are logged into their virtual classroom and secure, private student web sites.
After two minutes of independent typing and scrolling, the teacher shouts a happy Hello and sends them clicking into a class activities page. Once there, they open a linked PowerPoint presentation on biographical research, then a Word document with project guidelines. Now, it’s back to their own student web sites, where they transfer the information from the lesson links to brainstorming and thesis writing on their virtual paper and blogs on their wiki-hosted paperless classroom.
How New-millennium Students Work
This is life in the twenty-first century school, and today’s multitasking teenagers take to it as easily as they post media on MySpace or text friends on their cell phones. Generation M wants nothing to do with pencil and paper, and teachers are faced with an If-it’s-not-on-the-computer-I’m-not-interested-in-it attitude. So, enterprising educators are taking the never-ending battle for academic enthusiasm to their students’ turf – the Internet.
They’re not submitting to the old "If you can’t beat them, join them" axiom; rather, these forward-thinking classroom leaders are altering their methods so they can engage students with the interactive type of experience that they’re used to getting when they surf the web on their own time.
Web-based Instruction is Changing Education
Enter the paperless classroom. Using a web-based applications like wikis, blogs, podcasts and message boards, teachers are designing virtual learning environments, complete with daily activities, assignment guidelines, presentations and, most important, individual student web sites. So, for the busy Internet-trolling teen, who can’t be bothered with archaic pencil-and-paper homework, multitasking is the answer, and new school technology is the path.
He simply puts his instant-messaging pal on hold, clicks over to his own student web site in his paperless classroom and hacks out his nightly assignment in just a few minutes. The school work complete, he finishes his text, sends his e-mail, downloads his iTune and thrills the eager teacher, who grades the activity in real time, while sipping a latte at the local Starbucks. It’s remarkable how far education has come since the chalkboard-toting days of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Not that teachers aren’t still playing a vital role in student learning; they are simply acting more as facilitators, steering kids toward the myriad of interactive activities that augment the mini-lessons taught in the old brick and mortar class.
A Teacher Discusses Web-based Instruction
Brindi Kandel, a teacher from Garfield Heights, Ohio, used web-based instruction and student web sites daily during her student-teaching experience, and she saw uncanny results. “Web-based instruction holds students more accountable for their classroom performance,” Kandel says. “With a web-based classroom students don’t fall behind when absent. They can see exactly what they missed and in many cases complete the work at home with no additional help from the teacher.” (Interview with Suite101, May 2008)
Better still, adds Kandel, all students need is Internet access, and they can get any relevant class information – handouts, assignments, PowerPoint presentations, teacher notes or anything that can be placed on a web site or a blog. They can even listen to instruction from the teacher, who discusses a class activity during a brief podcast, embedded directly onto a classroom web site.
How did Kandel’s students feel about completing interactive tests and projects on their own web sites? Their exuberance tells the story. According to one bubbly seventh grader, pulled from Kandel’s class, “I love (web-based instruction). It’s easy, accessible and just so convenient to use. It’s amazing, and it makes me look forward to coming to class.”
Student Web Sites Allow Work to be Turned in at Home
It’s only moments from yet another bell in a day filled with 48-minute learning blocks, and 25 students are about to shut down their computers and dash off to a new class. Their teacher has some last words, before they spill into the school’s busy hallways: “Remember, the final draft of your research paper should be uploaded to your student web site by nine o’clock tonight.” A nighttime deadline for a middle school student? Miss Wilder’s farm-dwelling students would be boarding their horse drawn carriages to make a moonlit homework delivery.
Today’s new millennium students, though, just flip open their laptop computers, shrug and say, No problem. Of course not; they work in the paperless classroom.
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