E-Learning: Challenges In The Classroom

Guy Typing on a Laptop

Photo used by creative commons from LaMenta3

There’s a great article called The Challenge of Digital Media in the Classroom, which although is a year old, holds valid points. Of course, with the title alone, you can pretty much sum up the main idea.

Below are a few points from the article:

Good:

Students can go online to pursue advanced study, and join collaborative communities to add to the world’s store of knowledge. Creative platforms allow young artists and performers to publish and exchange their work.

Bad:

Teachers and professors are in a quandary about student use of laptops in a wired classroom. Many students claim that their computers are necessary for note-taking, but they also sneak looks at Facebook updates and instant messages during the lesson.

So yes, there are definitely positive and negative points when allowing computers and continuous connectivity into the classroom. (This is quite obvious.) And this is how it will always be: teaching methods and tools, and their corresponding pros and cons.

15 years ago while teaching was done only with a chalkboard, what was to stop a student from doodling at the back of his notebook? Fast forward to today, what’s to stop a students from quickly posting a status update?

My point is, whatever is done in the classroom, with technology or not, will always pose challenges. Although today, it might be easier to ask IT to block social media and networking sites to prevent students from accessing them. You couldn’t have asked IT to “block” doodling back in the day.

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