Education

Education on the internet has been present only very recently, in terms of how often it was used and what was available to help the user; being mainly students as the user. Now though education has become much more popular than it was in previous years, there is a much wider area of educational services and tools to use and help students in all areas of learning, whether that be languages, english, maths, science (virtually anything and everything). Online learning via tools and services is often known as something called Virtual Learning Environment, otherwise abbreviated to VLE. A more correct term for VLE may be a virtual environment for learning, instead of virtual learning environment, as this implicates that it is in fact the environment that is virtual and not the learning. A book and DVD pack called ‘Virtually There’ that is given out to schools by the Yorkshire and Humber Grid for Learning Foundation where a Professor Stephen Heppell said “Learning is breaking out of the narrow boxes that it was trapped in during the 20th century; teachers' professionalism, reflection and ingenuity are leading learning to places that genuinely excite this new generation of connected young school students — and their teachers too. VLEs are helping to make sure that their learning is not confined to a particular building, or restricted to any single location or moment”. Here I have listed five very useful sites all of which regard the use of education on the internet:

-MyMaths

-BBC Bitesize

-JSTOR

-The Student Room

-Downloadable Exams

MyMaths:

MyMaths is a brilliant site for maths and statistics revision, whether you are in the stage of GSCE or KS3. It has many different interactive online which gets the student involved with the lesson, asking them to perhaps type in the answer to a question or rotate a ruler to find the correct measurement. The lessons take you through many explanations to ensure that you understand as fully as can be; there are also some instances in which the lesson will be slightly different every time you do it, meaning that some quick questions for you to try will have lots of different types of questions. There are also some games that manage to combine learning and fun into the same category which helps to stem yourself to learn more. It does however require a user name and password, something of which I only know through my school as they made one user name for everyone to use, so this may mean that if someone found MyMaths by other means other than their school they would have to possibly go through many terms and conditions.                             

BBC Bitesize:

BBC Bitesize, although a revision site like MyMaths, offers many more curriculum lessons along with Maths, but also lessons such as english and science. It is very user friendly and can be used by a number of students across all school types; it offers lessons and revision topics for KS1, 2 and 3 and also provides many lessons for GCSE level. All the key stages are given the option to choose from maths, science and english whereas GCSE is given languages, religious studies and many more. Unlike MyMaths GCSE Bitesize does not provide many interactive lessons, apart from multi-choice tests that you can complete once you have read through the revision section. On the other hand there are several games which incorporate the learning aspect into a fun little break from hard learning. As well as interactive games they also have videos which you can watch to take in the learning from a different prospective.

JSTOR:

JSTOR is a site in which a student can download lessons and activity sheets to help them through revision. There is a link in the upper right hand corner giving information about what the site has to offer and quotes: “JSTOR is a not–for–profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive of over one thousand academic journals and other scholarly content. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship”. You are able to download hundreds of images and sources by the means of a PDF file; PDF, standing for Portable Document Format, is one of the most commonly used ways to allow students to download the content. Due to JSTOR’s incredible and vast data base of PDF files and images, finding exactly what you need may become a problem is it features so much data.

The Student Room:

The Student Room, originally known as UK Learning from 2001-2004, is an internet based forum for students everywhere, with an estimated 500,000 members and more than 26 million posts on the site. The site consists of students posting questions about general school related life such as courses, studying and careers for the near future. As The Student Room is a community based site students are able to help each other which is what the site relies on to keep a healthy flowing momentum throughout. Although the site is not a profit orientated website there is optional subscriptions that can be paid by the users and advertisements on the site from Google; all of which go towards keeping the site up and running.

Downloadable Exams, AQA:

AQA, which stands for Assessment and Qualifications Alliance, is an exam board in which GCSE, AS and A Level examinations are composed. It is an awarding exam body in England, Northern Ireland and Wales and one of the most commonly used exam bodies in the UK. The site of AQA offers many resources and help to students and teachers everywhere. One of the most valuable features of the AQA website is the downloadable past test papers that you can print off. Since the board offers a vast number of subjects there are numerous papers for each. Not only are you able to download the question paper, but the answers too, meaning that you can do revision from home with the papers and mark the test yourself.

Advantages of Online Education:

-You can access the revision lessons and resources from home.

-You can use the sites when it suits for you to do so, once you’ve talked about the topic in class. You’re not tied down to a class schedule.

-Most of the time the sources will be free of charge.

-The way in which you retrieve information online can be done via email, school websites downloading, printing etc. It is very easy to collect the documents you need.

-If there are any questions you might have about a document or information there is usually a forum that gives you help about what you need.

-There are many different ways in which you can learn online, perhaps by video, audio, forums, downloadable test papers etc.

Disadvantages of Online Education:

-You may need to give information about if you are taking a degree or the syllabus you are with which will be evidence for the site.

-Even though there is an endless amount of information on the internet, most of the information may be bias, unimportant or completely false.

-Communication within a class room is much more ideal in terms of the teacher and student than it is online.

-Some courses may not be available to some if they are taking a lesser known subject, and finding information for such a course can become difficult.

My Experience:

My experience of education on the internet mainly comes from revision. I have used BBC Bitesize throughout most of my school life as it was such an easy site to grasp and revise from. The information is easy to understand and you can find it with ease. The fact that they have many sub titles for certain topics also helps you to find specifically what you are looking for. I have also used the AQA website to download past papers and answers to help me in certain lessons a little while before the actual exam was; this defiantly gives you a very promising look at how to answer particular questions in the exam as most questions would be the same but have a different circumstance or worded slightly different. MyMaths was a very useful website to use for me as well especially since I did both mathematics and statistics for GCSE and MyMaths gave an amazing set of lessons and revision tips to help me through certain topics I didn’t quite understand fully in class, but the in-depth explanations and examples worked amazingly.