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OK, that's a very fair question. I'll describe a few scenarios where a teacher might be online AND teaching at the same time:
1. Some classrooms are run like workshops with many activities occuring at once, multi-tasking. It sounds like a beehive, rather than a teacher lecturing from the front of the room. Appropriately run, the teacher is circulating to ensure all are working well. Poorly run, the kids are working while the teacher is doodling online.
Still, the kids are working and learning. He set up the tasks and is available to answer questions if anyone gets stuck. It's not great teaching, but it's a plain everyday lesson.
2. He broke up the class into smaller groups. One group of kids is tasked to retrieve information from books, another is sent for information available only online. In that situation, the teacher might have his computer online at the same time as his students, to monitor their research while across the room.
2. The teacher is very creative. If teaching a class about the Middle East, he can dial up a live camera that is focused on the Western Wall in Jerusalem, 24 hours each day. The students can literally "be there" at that moment. If he spins his screen around to show them, he has made a glorious visual lesson in geography, history, etc. Or, he might want to open a lesson with the stirring sounds of a Martin Luther King speech, click click and they hear his voice, see his expression.
3. The class might have a "pen-pal" style relationship with a high school class in China or anywhere else around the globe. His class might be asking their agemates in China, or AUstralia, or wherever, their opinion on a current event or new technology.
4. Least common denominator, but still mareginally acceptable in a classroom: the kids are all doing independent research at their desks, taking notes from a textbook, filling out a worksheet, or studying a document for discussion in a few moments. Meanwhile, the teacher's online because, technically, the students are engaged and working. There's some value to teaching kids independent research skills so they get away from constant spoon-feeding of information. During those times, if the teacher is online, the students aren't learning any less; he's irrelevant for a few minutes. Teachers used to do this in the l970's, too, but maybe read a book instead, for that part of a class.
Not all teaching is in lecture form.
BUT IF, for one MOMENT, the teacher mistakenly leaves the site on a game of solitaire (default setting for afterschool hours), and one kid sees it, he could decide the teacher is gambling online and blow the roof off the school. IF, for one second, a teacher uses her 10 minute break to check on a piece of real estate she might visit after school, and a parent drops into the classroom, the parent might decide to post on CC that her kid's h.s. teacher uses the computer to search for real estate during school hours.
That's life in the public school biz.
Last edited by paying3tuitions; 11-17-2007 at 03:52 AM.
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