Today we talked about online teaching and how we viewed online learning, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. For me, online school was hard. I felt less engaged, unable to apply myself and generally apathetic about school. In person, there was a lot more to look forward to. I liked that I could do work at my own pace online, but I disliked not seeing my friends and getting to interact with others. Given the option, I would almost always choose face-to-face learning because I find I can just get more out of it.

As a future teacher, a tool I have in my back pocket is the Gizmos tool. It allows for the use of lessons online and many of the teachers at Royal Bay still use it today. It has many biology demonstrations, simulations, and interactive lessons available and delivered online. Another resource is online dissection tools like this bird dissection website. With tools like this one, students can explore anatomy without being in person.

We also talked about synchronous and asynchronous learning this class. In my opinion, online learning should be mostly asynchronous because choosing when to do school work is one of the only benefits of online learning. For high school students, I can see why asynchronous might be bad though, especially for unmotivated students.

Throughout the pandemic, I thought a lot about the elementary-aged kids who had to do school online. It would be really easy for kids to fall behind if their parents weren’t around to facilitate their learning. This is an accessibility issue for sure. Many high school-aged kids do not have their own laptops and this is a consideration for online learning as well.

I would love to hear others’ thoughts on online learning. Are there any online tools that would be especially useful for online classes that I haven’t mentioned? It would be awesome to compile a list of resources for my future career.