Web Opening New Classroom Doors

By Amy Hetzner

12/13/07

When students from her 10th-grade honors class returned from summer break, Arrowhead High School teacher Kathy Nelson organized an online open-house activity to discuss three novels they had read during their time off.

After six hours, the English teacher at the Hartland school had a 178-page transcript of her students' dialogue and a new appreciation of the power the remote technology of the Internet can lend to the sometimes intensely interpersonal field of teaching.

"You think of computers as being cold," she said. "But they were really into some deep topics."

Even as fully virtual schools face an uncertain future after a state appeals court this week found one such school violated state laws, most of today's students are more likely to encounter an online learning experience like that practiced in Nelson's honors English classroom.

Instead of replacing the face-to-face interaction of a brick-and-mortar school with a virtual-school experience, Nelson and other teachers throughout the Milwaukee area are using online discussion boards, textbooks, surveys and collaborative features to extend class time beyond the traditional school day.

The approach makes sense not only pedagogically - based on the idea that students learn best from each other through sharing ideas - but also as preparation for higher education, in which combining online learning with lectures is fast becoming the norm, said Myragene Pettit, a librarian and technology director for Arrowhead.

With that in mind, Arrowhead, in Waukesha County, trained 35 teachers over the summer on how to use the online teaching tool Moodle. Another 27 people signed up for classes this fall, putting the school on track to have about one-third of its educators conversant in the Internet-based course-management system by the end of this semester.

How teachers have used the technology varies, and the school has taken a gentle approach to encouraging its application instead of making it a mandate.

Even so, Arrowhead's north campus principal, Bonnie Laugerman, said: "Our expectation is that every single student will graduate from Arrowhead with an online (experience) as part of the class - not the whole class, but part of the class."

Hartford Union High School had a similar goal when it took its required junior-level Focus on Careers class online. Today, about a quarter of the school's teachers have all of their class materials on the Internet, said Lisa Olson, the district's supervisor of technology services.

That means that if a student misses a class because of an illness or another reason, all of the lesson materials, quizzes and assignments are a mouse click away.

"It's helped us with that population, so students don't fall behind," Olson said. "And the students really love it."

Wealth of possibilities

The technology also can help the school to offer low-enrollment classes in subjects such as foreign languages, allowing for groups of students to learn at different levels online with help from a classroom teacher, she said.

The school is exploring using technology for remediating students who need to make up work for credits or for summer-school classes.

"It just sort of mushroomed when you started thinking of all the possibilities," Olson said.

The Mequon-Thiensville School District is in its third year of training teachers on how to incorporate the Internet-based program Blackboard into their classes. Like Hartford, the district uses the online-learning feature in a required computer-topics class to give all students some experience before graduation, said district technology director Connie Jaeger.

Other teachers have been encouraged to use Blackboard as well. Some, such as Homestead High School English teacher Bob Wells, have embraced the opportunity.

Wells uses his Web site to post daily assignments. On Blackboard, he posts links to audio clips from National Public Radio and short stories by Ernest Hemingway and sets up forums in which his students are required to respond to different questions about the materials.

He said he especially likes the opportunity to have students engage in written rather than oral discussions for his expository writing class.

The biggest limitations, in Wells' view, are the extra demands placed on his time and the difficulty some students have in making the transition to online learning.

"It doesn't fit all students' learning styles," Wells said. "It matches some, but for others, they just feel uncomfortable working in a virtual environment, even though maybe they're spending four hours on their Facebook (pages)."

A lighter backpack

At Arrowhead, students in Nelson's Honors English 10 class that had the six-hour online activity this year said they like virtual learning, for the most part.

Because their textbook is online, they said backpacks have been noticeably lighter. It also makes it easier to collaborate with other students after school.

"The only negative would be is if it's your homework assigned every night and your computer crashes, you're lost," said sophomore Jenna Villanova, who uses Moodle for both her English and political science classes.

Access to computers also can be an issue. Even though nearly all of Arrowhead's students have a computer at home, many still have to share it with parents and siblings. School officials point out that students can use school computers or those at libraries in a pinch.

Teachers using the technology said they have been careful not to pile too much onto students, mostly transferring activities they once might have tried in their classrooms to the online world.

"The nicest thing for me is getting kids who wouldn't talk in class to communicate online," said Mike Williamson, who uses Moodle for his U.S. history class at Arrowhead. "I just see it as an awesome supplement to my daily teaching."