Although I no longer offer the service to anyone outside of friends, I briefly offered e-tutoring sessions. It can be a rewarding situation in the right settings, but I was in a new place and din’t have the time to appropriately drum up a client base.
One of the benefits of e-tutoring is that it doesn’t matter where the tutor and the student are sitting. A student can be hundreds of miles away from the person who best fits their learning needs rather than hoping they can find a right match locally, or perhaps they have already exhausted the local tutoring pool and not found someone who can teach them.
What is happening, though, is that students are now sitting thousands of miles away from their tutor. This outsourcing brings up some fears, at least for me, since I make a goodly portion of my income from tutoring.
I can remember when a teacher’s greatest fear was being replaced by a computer (while computers may become major educational tools, they will never be able to completely replace the teacher). Now, we have to be afraid of those countries with a more advanced level of understanding in the math and sciences (the two main subjects I teach). Allowing this outsourcing of extra educational help is somewhat scary.
It almost feels like we have given up on improving our education system, or at least the math and science parts of it. How long before we have a crop of teachers come up who don’t worry about whether or not they have to teach math or science because we can turn to more advanced countries for those subjects. Are we doing the American educational system a disservice by outsourcing to these tutors?
Or perhaps, is this just one more sign that the world is getting smaller, and collaborative efforts will indeed prove incredibly beneficial to us? I think I like that idea more.
Found via elearningpost
Posted by Rebecca as Teaching methods at 8:17 AM EDT
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I have a passing interest in e-learning, and I’m becoming more interested in how the social web is playing into it, especially for younger students. The term "digital native" is often used with these kids because many of today’s high schoolers (and younger) have never known a time where there wasn’t a computer easily accessible.
Here’s another interesting view on the role of technology in teaching these digital natives.
Posted by Rebecca as e-learning at 7:55 AM EDT
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This week has just been crazy, but I did stumble across some information architecture resources. I haven’t had a chance to go through them all yet, but I’m looking forward to it!
Found via elearningpost
Posted by Rebecca as Information Architecture at 7:45 AM EDT
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I do many things. I create jewelry (and other craft forms). I write. I teach. (I do several others, but these are the point of this post.)
I have taught some of my jewelry techniques, mostly the macrame-related ones, over the past several years. I make nice jewelry, and I can teach those techniques fairly well. Those are concrete skills that form the basis for developing one’s own design style.
I have been writing for as long as anyone can remember. Now, I’m teaching the basics of writing, and it’s so much more a fleeting thing. I can teach the concrete grammar skills, but teaching a child to put their ideas down on paper…it’s such an interesting challenge. To teach a child about strong word choice and writing concisely without giving up meaning. It’s really being a great learning experience.
As I am learning to teach children how to write the perfect five-papragraph papers, I am also learning a new writing form while trying to educate adults and teenagers that nonfiction is not a subgenre of fiction. It’s getting pretty intense, and I feel like my life is being overtaken by writing.
Posted by Rebecca as Teaching methods at 11:40 AM EDT
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"In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them."
- Johann von Neumann
Math is one of those subjects that just scares most of us, and the above quote illustrates why. Without some form of meaning associated with what we’re learning, any subject becomes this formidable beast. When I teach, I try to give my students concrete examples that address the why and how of what we’re doing, and I don’t move the student on until I know they’re comfortable with the concept.
Students don’t just learn because we expect them to. They learn because they become interested in the content, and the best way to get them interested is to show them the inner workings of the content, show them what makes things tick. Students love that kind of knowledge becasue it helps them be able to handle these problems later on down the road, even if they’ve forgotten exactly what to do.
Posted by Rebecca as Reflective teaching at 8:31 AM EDT
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I think I may have hit a turning point in my attempt to understand and accept tagging.
I think I’ve mentioned that I am for learning through building connections. I think that’s how the strongest learning takes place, because your brain has this organized web of knowledge to help you process what you are learning. The strength is in building and reinforcing these connections. Interestingly enough, there are those who believe that this same idea about connections is true in e-learning settings as well.
In building these connections, the burden of learning is really placed on the learner himself or herself. The learner is asked to create the connections that make the most sense within the web of prior knowledge already contained within the learner’s own mind. For the internet setting, this is where tagging becomes a useful tool.
Tagging helps show what connections a user is building between their concepts, not locking them into someone else’s classification concepts. It allows the user to create their own web that is referable in a manner that makes sense to the learner.
Posted by Rebecca as Learning methods at 8:05 AM EDT
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…teach a man to fish…
So often in my teaching job, I see the results of someone who has taught a student to deal with a specific problem. (Sometimes, I am guilty of this myself when the problem is beyond what I can remember easily.) I prefer to teach students a strategy for dealing with potential situations in their problem solving to better arm them for future run-ins with similar problems.
Continuing in the fun crossovers from last week, this article addresses instruction/policy vs. strategy in the corporate ‘verse (who knew reading Skip would be so much fun!) but has so much application in the educational realm as well. Policies, like teachable moments, so often address one specific situation, and then ends up with all manner of exceptions that could easily have been kept at bay if the policy had come down as a strategy instead.
A teachable moment (an instruction) is a quick-fix. A strategy is a component of a learner’s problem-solving tool kit.
Posted by Rebecca as Teaching methods at 8:15 AM EDT
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I have always said that I’m more of an informal educator than anything else. This is evident in the planning of my new website.Among everything else I’m planning to have up, I’m planning for the various channels of the web site to have educational components, as well. I’m exploring my options on this front in the hopes of setting up appropriate experiences for my visitors.
Being an informal educator has always been challenging for me because I have to explain to people what that means. I now have hopes for a simpler explanation now, thanks to this great article that includes definitions of formal, nonformal, and informal learning.
Found via elearnspace
Posted by Rebecca as Learning methods at 7:53 AM EDT
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