Online Teaching Experiences

I have yet to be in a classroom as an actual teacher at this point in my career. I will be starting a teaching job in Tashkent, Uzbekistan in August teaching elementary school computers at an international curriculum school, yet a main goal of mine is to be a high school history teacher at some point in the near future. History is my subject of choice to both learn and to teach, so I was looking at this list of online resources from a perspective of a history teacher. I found that one great resource to use in a history classroom would be online field-trips. Online field trips allow students to experience different parts of the world without ever having to leave the classroom. As technology keeps on getting better, the quality and interactions between virtual and real life will undoubtedly continue to be blurred, making for some unbelievable educational opportunities. All that a student will need is an internet connection and a computer, and an entire World of information in the state of audio, video, words, and other mediums is right at their fingertips.

A lot of virtual field trips and explorations are already available on the internet as was apparent by the online experience guide. I checked out some of the links and found that many great tours of both geographical and historical features were available free of charge. I then did a few Google searches of virtual tours of some famous sites in history and found that a vast percentage of them have virtual tours available. Gettysburg, Auschwitz, the Taj Mahal, and the Smithsonian all offer virtual tours of their museums and areas. There are now applications available online, like Google Earth and Google Street View, that allow users to basically visit portions of cities through some simple searching and mouse clicking. These types of programs and virtual tours have many many applications inside of the classroom. Students can learn a lot about the physical appearance of something that they may have read about many times but never actually seen. I visited Auschwitz when I was around 14 or 15 years old and it surprised me how serene and almost neighborhood-like Auschwitz was. I associated my knowledge of Auschwitz with what I assumed it was going to look like, giving me a perspective that the death camp was going to feel and look like an evil and vile place, but that was far from the case. Seeing it gave me an entirely new perspective. Visiting Auschwitz from the U.S on a class field trip would cost at least 2,000 dollars, which is beyond the reach of most schools and families. A computer can take you to Europe in seconds, and while the experience isn't exactly the same as being there, it is definitely the second best thing. Using virtual reality with students could be used as parts of projects, explorations, or any number of assignments.

One type of resource that I could see as being problematic for students would be educational online gaming. In my experience with gaming, especially at the primary and secondary levels of education, students can easily get addicted to games to an extent that it begins to hamper their other classroom activities. While online learning games can be a good thing, I think that overall the possibilities of problems it presents wouldn't be worth implementing them in a classroom unless the software was excellently designed and organized.