Education

Online Education allows people of any age to research and learn about topics available to you on the internet. It enables schools and higher education’s to use these websites to help students revise for tests or exams and to achieve a better understand on the topic.

 

Impact of the internet on students

Since the internet first became available there have been some very dramatic changes on people’s life styles. Those who are experienced with using the internet on a daily basis would some become helpless if it was to disappear. The internet has a huge impact on the life of a student as the usage of educational websites is very high. Also the World Wide Web holds millions and millions of pages of useful information which comes of great use to students who need to find something out fast without having to search through numerous books.

Work is so much easier to access on the internet, all the updated information you need is available to you at any time of the day no matter of your whereabouts. When doing work online you have the option to save what you are doing, people tend to saves their work in their personal documents, but when this is done on a schools system it is possible to get to work at school via remote access on the internet. This is possible at the school I attend, and we use a software programme called ‘Frog’, this allows us to access our own school drives as well as the schools drive if we need help or to access something the teacher has set.

 

Internet is always kept up to date and new descriptive information is being uploaded all the time. This is a much better option to use as your source of information in comparison to text books. Text books tend not to be very useful today, they are not up to date but instead are years old. You can now receive really good contemporary information from the internet which comes in much greater use then general text books.

 

Although the internet is extremely useful today, it does have some disadvantages also. Surfing the net leads to distractions, if you are sat at home doing research you may see something that interests you or catches your eye and you instantly get drawn away from what you are doing, and then begin to focus on what you spotted. The World Wide Web contains thousands of social networking sites, if you are on a computing device it is almost certain that you will get tempted to sign into one, and then instead of getting on with homework for example, the average person could spend hours on social networking sites talking to friends or admiring blogs. Therefore using the internet to acquire information is not always the best idea, and if you are a person that becomes easily distracted by the littlest thing then it is probably better that sticking to researching using books from libraries or text books provided by schools.

 

Mobile phones today are so advanced that the average phone has access to the internet, especially Smartphone’s, they have the fastest speed rate of connecting to the internet as that is what they’re designed to do. Therefore the internet on a phone can be used to activate information if needed. But if this is the case there distractions are also a possibility, a phone receives text messages and calls all the time, especially if you are a student that is a teenager. There are also games on a phone that are there in case the user gets bored, and when having to do work, of course boredom is going to occur. So just switching to using the phone normally is going to be the case most the time, instead of sticking to using it for research.

Mobile phones are also banned from examination rooms, this is because all of what I mentioned above, they cause distractions and the candidate would not focus fully on their exam paper and the question answering. But also as there are so many Smartphone’s about and millions of people now have then, students in exams would have the opportunity to browse through the internet and find the answer to questions on the paper, this is called cheating and would result in disqualification.  Therefore no electronic devices are now allowed in the exam rooms at the specific time of the exam and throughout.

 

Fact: The e-Learning Foundation says that children without access to a computer and the internet in the evening are being increasingly disadvantaged in the classroom. Research suggests that 1.2 million teenagers log on to revision pages every week and those using online resources were on average likely to attain a grade higher in exams.

 

Educational Websites

 

BBC Bite size is an educational website that was launched in 1998 and run by the BBC. It offers free online study support resources for school students in the United Kingdom. It is designed to provide help and support for students with both school work and exams. Bite size is available on a variety of devices including the web and mobile phones. The website offers help with the 3 main subjects, including English, Mathematics and all sciences, this is because these subjects are considered more important to receive a good grade in, therefore detailed explanations of information on each subject is provided. All three of these subjects are split into subcategories to help find what you are looking, also so there is a selection to choose from to revise.  These subjects are selected from the curriculum Key Stage 1, Key Stage 2, Key Stage 3 and GCSE. There are a series of tests available to you for each subject on BBC Bite size that are there if you feel it is necessary for you to practice what you have just revised and so you can test your own knowledge. These tests help you get an idea of how well you are doing and what level you are working at as feedback is given. There is always an immediate response as feedback is given to aware you of what you did right and wrong and what parts of a subject you seem to be struggling with, this is of a great benefit for the student because it means there are now aware of what they need to study and practice more of to improve.

 

Other educational websites such as My Maths and Sam Learning tend to be linked to schools, so that each student can log into the chosen website using their own personal login and password, so that their information can be accessed and checked. My Maths website allows students to practice particular maths questions online that they may be struggling with in school lessons, or simply just want to revise for an upcoming test or exam. My Maths gives the student immediate feedback of questions they done with the mark they received and how well they done.  The website also allows them to have homework set, so that each student can do a topic on maths and the information of how well they done is shown on the teacher’s login. The information says who has completed the homework and what their grade is on that specific homework. Another online education site similar to My Maths is called Sam Learning, the website has logins and passwords for each student and students can compete with friends to get the highest scores on different work sheets on a range of topics. These worksheets get set by the teacher for the student to use as a revision guide, Sam learning is made to be competitive, this is so learning becomes slightly more fun for the student but is beneficial as it makes them want to do well and get the best score possible.

 

When I was doing my GCSE’s I personally used all of these websites for revision and help when I was at home. I used Bite size to help me with my English as it holds a lot of useful information that came of great help to me during my literature exams. My Maths helped me to achieve highly in maths, I used the website on a daily basis so I made sure I didn’t forget anything. Also my German teacher set me work on Sam learning every lesson so the revision was on going.

 

Wikipedia is a collaboratively edited, multilingual Internet encyclopedia. It is supported by Wikimedia Foundation who of which gains no profit from the website. It has 23 million articles worldwide, but over 4 million in the English Wikipedia alone, have been written by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site, and anyone has the option to upload at any time possible, it has about 100,000 active contributors today. Wikipedia can be very useful because it is available at any time and holds nearly all information any person might need, however it sometimes holds false information, this is because anybody can post so we can never be sure whether or not people are being one hundred percent truthful or correct.

Students around today are constantly using Wikipedia to find the answer to anything, this is a disadvantage for students when they are required to complete homework, considering all they tend to do is copy and paste the information provided, and this means a whole class of students will end up handing in similar homework’s. This goes to show that Wikipedia makes for lazy research as no real work is done, all the information is handed to you. Another disadvantage about Wikipedia is, it promotes plagiarism, this is caused from people constantly taking the information provided and using it as this own when really it has just been copied, and this enhances copyright.

 

I tend to stay away from using Wikipedia as my source of information as I cannot fully trust what is being said, so I see it as being unreliable.

Wall wisher is an educational website that is beneficial for both the student and teacher. Wall Wisher is an online notice board marker; it acts like a normal whiteboard in a classroom would. It allows you your own virtual space where you can post short text notes in the same way that you could write onto a whiteboard in your classroom using a board pen. But this notice board can be shared between people all over the world. As well as text notes you have the option of adding images, videos and links to other websites. It’s a convenient and easy way of getting to a shared space which holds lots of information to collect ideas from people for a brainstorm, or to post resources for a topic your studying. Students could ask questions about a topic which you or another person can then answer.

 

Online Exams

Online examinations are usually available for much older students taking master degrees and university degrees. This is because they can be most trusted with this form of examinations and will take them seriously and get them done on time and efficiently.  An online exams and test that are taken online are also assessed and marked online as well. If it is a test there will be instant feedback once you have completed the test, this gives you a brief idea of how well you are doing with that topic and may give you ideas of how to improve at the very end also.

An Online examination is a new technique to conduct an examination through the internet. This has become quite popular because of its high rate on convenience and time efficiency. The formal and most popular examination system is such a long procedure in order to conduct a single exam. Therefore an advantage of taking an online examination is it saves much more time then a formal exam, this is mainly because examination officers do not need to be hired to conduct the examination, and this is very costly and extremely tedious. It would be much simpler if all exams were taken place through the use of the internet, it would require a recruiter to just send a mail of the exam to the candidates. Lots of companies are gladly taking this modern system to account instead of using the tedious written examination system. The main advantages of online examinations are the low cost as it just simply requires emailing the candidate of what their account login is, there is no posting required. You will get a control panel, using this control panel you can find out your examination date and time. There is minimum effort needed, minimum employee deployment, saves time, instant results and near enough immediate feedback, as well as no staff required to mark papers.

Using this system the recruiter can conduct examination in India and abroad. They can select candidates for their organization within very short time span. The recruiter can upload their own questions from their control panel either they can conduct the examination by our uploaded questions.

Forums

 

There are a number of forums available to students, such as student room. Student room is a webpage for students of any age to be able to discuss their courses and problems with other students from various schools across the globe. You can talk to these other students about just about anything and you will never have to worry about seeing this person. You can ask for help off people to get a better understanding of a topic, or you may just chose to talk about courses and topics to share issues with people to make yourself feel better, sometimes its better to understand that you are not alone and you not the only person who is struggling.  

If there is not another student to talk to about something you don’t understand you also have the option of consulting an expert about you problems online to help with your studies. Such as teachers, there is now the ability to communicate with teachers via email on most forums. They can give you help, advice and ever e-mail you practise question papers of topics you need to study further. Teachers can submit marks online to let you know how well you done and what you need to improve on still.

YouTube

YouTube is an online public communications site, founded in February 2005, YouTube allows billions of people to discover watch and share original videos created by the public. YouTube provides a forum to allow people to connect, inform and inspire others across the nation. The site allows for registered users with an account to upload videos for anybody to view. Anyone who goes to the site can view the videos that are posted on this site. The videos vary in quality depending on the maker.

Google picked up on the wave of all the public communications, and purchased the popular site known as YouTube. The purchase price was 1.65 billion dollars.

When making a video to post on YouTube just about anything is possible, you have the option to post whatever you desire. Any person can also watch just about anything on YouTube depending on the content of the video, some have age restrictions. There is a high amount of intriguing videos out there on YouTube that are very interesting and entertaining in the eyes of some people. There are educational videos, entertainment such as trailers for films, comedy, action, music which is free to listen to at any time, marketing and so much more.

YouTube updates regularly, this is good because people are constantly searching for new and recent information. New videos are being posted each and every day by thousands of people; there is a constant flow of updates occurring. This is why people turn to YouTube to try and find out things, also because it comes with a graphic video included, such as news reports.

Teachers in schools are at a great advantage when having access to YouTube during school times. When teaching a subject, showing students demonstrations using videos instead of constantly talking at them tends to engage the student into the topic more and gets them interested and wants to discuss the video afterwards, this is because of the high rate of new technology used by students today, they are used to watching videos and spending hours sat at a computer.

There are several advantages of using YouTube, such as, if you own a business, YouTube is a great for the advertisement of your product; this can be done for little cost. This is also a great way to run ongoing information about new products or services to the same people and new people who may be interested.

If you create music to post music, this is a great way of reaching the public. You can put your video out there at next to no cost. After the video has been posted, you can access it online and see the public’s thoughts and opinions. You will also be able to start a circle of your music, so that when you put a new song out there, the people who have recently been interested in your music can follow still.

YouTube is an extremely popular site available today; a vast majority of the public is using it daily, especially students. When school students are sat at home attempting to do their set work it is easy to get distracted, either by social networking sites or music. YouTube contains millions of music videos available to anyone, therefore when any person decides to listen to music on here they automatically get distracted by either the video, lyrics on screen or simply just the changing of song selection every few minutes. This means a consistency of concentration is broken which results in less work being done and probably at a rather poor quality due to the lack of effort. This is a disadvantage for both student and teacher as grades will drop which reflects badly on the teacher.

How does using Information Technology in the classroom help you?

I.T in the class room is very useful considering it allows students to type up work, learn new things and develop new ideas and skills, when they eventually leave school, what they learnt during school time may become of great use in their jobs, especially if they are working with computers. Personally I think using I.T is helpful and saves a remarkable amount of time, it is much easier to type up things rather than to write information down in a notepad which could easily get misplaced. Computers save work easily instead of trying to find the work you have wrote out. Having I.T in the classroom enables the students to interact with one another, but also research things that they are unsure of.

I.T has allowed me to learn a lot about computing, I have developed many new skills, which will contribute to helping me find a job when I leave school. All students today have been given an advantage towards finding jobs in the technology business world.