Online Learning (C Posting)

“Online Learning Earns a Net Gain” by Niesha Lofing is about an English teacher named Dylan Holcomb who has incorporated technology into his lessons. The success in his classroom has helped to spread technology to other teachers throughout the district. He uses internet tools such as Google Earth to enhance lessons. Holcomb feels the internet works well with the students because it is part of their generation. Some of the tools he uses are instant messages for in-class participation for answering homework and Blogs for their homework assignments. Google has taken notice that educators are using their tools to enhance learning and has set up tutorials to teach the tools and products offered through the Google website. The teachers feel that the students are “more reflective and use better problem-solving skills” when technology is present in their educations.
Holcomb class seems like it would be fun for high school students. Using instant messaging to answer homework problems is great so everyone can respond. In one of my math classes at Florida Gulf Coast University we used a clicker that was only used for that class to answer questions. The results to the class’s answers were displayed on an overhead, which calculated the percentage of students that picked each answer. It was fun and kept a large class participating. Google is also a great website with many helpful tools for educators, and I liked that this article gave credit to Google.

Online learning earns a net gain