Anyway, one of the parents involved, John Painter has a blog associated with the organization, Readingtonparents.org Editor's Blog. He recently posted an essay on the various pitfalls of assigning homework that requires the internet. Here's the opening paragraph:
One recent survey of K-12 teachers indicated that 77% of them assign homework which requires the internet. My experience with my own kids certainly backs that up. Unfortunately, these assignments not only require an internet connection, but also direct parental supervision. Most (if not all) of these assignments are based on a simplistic or erroneous understanding of internet technology, or they put an undue burden on parents to provide expensive infrastructure and safety monitoring.
Since I'm not involved with the daily homework grind anymore (except for myself) I found his comments eye-opening.
Student blogs are another big thing. Last year, my son's class created a blog about our school and town. It was monitored (?) by the teacher and had certain controls. The idea is to learn about technology and have fun writing, with the usual internet-style complete disregard for spelling, grammar, and punctuation.
ReplyDeleteOf course, the kids used the blog website to create their own blogs at home. It's up to the parents to monitor and control this activity, and I'm sure a lot of parents don't have a clue. The computer my son uses is in a common area, not his bedroom, so it's easier for us to keep track of what's going on.
On my son's (and a couple of friend's) sixth grade blog I noticed that there was someone posting who was clearly a high school kid (or pretended to be). It didn't seem odd to my son or his friends that an older kid would be interested in the blogging silliness of sixth graders. And the kids couldn't see the importance of not using their real names or addresses, even though the school told them, and I told them.
My beef with internet homework is that the students have not been taught how to search or how to choose appropriate search terms. I knew to add 'for kids' or 'for patients' to any science topic, but my children didn't...so if I hadn't been actively monitoring the search results and intervening, they would have been totally out of time to do their other homework.
ReplyDeleteI would like to see the internet used in more useful ways. Textbook on-line,exercises in various subjects, and foreign language listening lab would all be helpful.